Betty’s, a downtown Toronto bar, is all warm wood tones and squeaky floors, its seafoam walls barely visible through a collection of framed sports memorabilia. Last October, it was the site of a celebration commemorating the National Post’s 11th anniversary. Once the spoiled child of media baron Conrad Black, the paper had more extravagant parties in its infancy. The first birthday bash in October 1999 was a blur of the owner’s friends, advertisers, free booze and “freaking excess” at the Royal Ontario Museum. As one Postreporter recalls: “The thing was like a Roman circus.” At its second anniversary, half-naked newspaper boys posed for pictures to the delight of Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel.

Tonight’s event is considerably more low-key. Betty’s has 30 beers on tap and an open mic night every Wednesday. A dozen reporters and editors share an evening of laughs and a few pints. But there’s a half-empty glass of dark ale warming where the editor-in-chief should be sitting. Doug Kelly is on the sidewalk under a street light—smoking, pacing, scribbling notes and fiddling with his BlackBerry.

The guy running one of the country’s most troubled newspapers is fielding calls from corporate executives. The Post will transfer from its holding company, Canwest CMI (which filed for creditor protection), to the subsidiary Canwest LP (which is in a forbearance agreement with its lenders). In retrospect, this is the first sign of a seismic change. (The move will ensure that Canwest’s broadcast and newspaper assets are sold separately.) Other newspapers bank Post obituaries—and one headline on The New York Times website declares, “Canada’s Cheeky Conservative Paper May Close.” Kelly retaliates with a front-page editorial and the newspaper that seems to defy Darwinian law lives to see another day, even if that new day will dawn under new ownership.

A few weeks after the party, sitting in his office atop the Post’s three-storey low-rise in suburban Toronto, Kelly looks tired and slightly defeated while he fiddles with an empty Starbucks venti. (Full disclosure: I worked as an unpaid intern at the Post for four weeks in the summer of 2009, but did not meet Kelly until I showed up uninvited at Betty’s to report on this story.) Dressed casually in a Friday uniform of jeans and a black sportcoat, his hair silver at the temples, the pressure of the job shows. One Post columnist describes him as having the look of a second-term president. But if Kelly’s Post were a nation, it would be in a state of unrest.

And one with a checkered history. In the late 1990s, Kelly was assistant managing editor at the Financial Post. The weekly tabloid (then owned by Sun Media) struggled to compete with The Globe and Mail’s gold mine, Report on Business. The paper went daily in 1988, and 10 years later was making a modest annual profit of $15 million. Black bought FP in July 1998 to anchor his soon-to-be-launched broadsheet, confirming that his plan for a flagship national paper was more than just an industry rumour. By the time it launched three months later, Black’s paper had inherited a name, a profitable brand and a base of 100,000 national subscribers.

The Post started a newspaper war that cost the industry $1 billion to shore up newsrooms and marketing defences. A fierce competitor, the paper would pursue any story at any cost, sending reporters on the last flight of the Concorde, to India to ride the trains for a week and to Finland to attend a snowball fight. It once bought a plot of land on the moon.

Lunar real estate may have come cheap (at $10 an acre from moon-landregistry.com), but it wasn’t the best investment—the site no longer exists. And it wasn’t the only financial misstep. When Canwest CMI filed for creditor protection last fall, a court-appointed monitor released details of the company’s staggering debt, including that of its flagship national paper. The Post had lost $139 million under Canwest ownership.

Back in 2001, two years after graduating from assistant managing editor at FP to assistant deputy editor at the Post, Kelly became executive editor. It was a modest promotion with a superior sounding title—and one of the worst jobs in journalism. That year, the paper’s losses were $65 million. Canwest had purchased most of Black’s publications, including half of the Post, for $3.2 billion in 2000. In August 2001, Canwest took full ownership. Less than a month later, on “Black Monday,” 120 employees lost their jobs.

Promoted to editor-in-chief in 2005 (following a purge of upper management and severe downsizing), Kelly is first to admit he was never the heir apparent—it’s not a job he consciously went after. And it wasn’t an enviable position either; the Post had conceded the Toronto newspaper war and morale was dismal. The new editor’s default role would be caregiver.

But after years of hubris-induced debt, Kelly’s pragmatism might be exactly what the paper needs. Distribution has shrunk and thenews boxes are almost extinct, but Kelly is after a specific—and intensely loyal—readership. The one-time vanity project is finally running like a business venture and, according to the publisher, is closer to profitability than it’s ever been. Without a rich founder’s money and with the hype of the newspaper war behind it, the Post is defining itself by carving a deeper niche and establishing an identity that even Kelly admits won’t appeal to everyone. And if anyone is going to lead the paper into the black, it could be the dark horse whose appointment caught everyone by surprise.

***

 Splashy poster board displays of old Post layouts, some of which ran in a retrospective for the anniversary issue, crowd the corner of Kelly’s office. The furnishings are understated: a glass-topped coffee table, four white chairs, a plush grey sofa and a matching club chair, into which he now sinks. The faux living room set-up looks rarely used, but his desk is strewn with papers, both loose-leaf and newsprint.

Laughter outside his perennially open door suggests the morning news meeting has formed in the hallway. Normally Kelly would join them, but today he’s inside speaking to me, and my presence there, he says, would “make people act differently.” There’s that, and the fact that Kelly started the interview with a list of things reporters tend to get wrong: the process surrounding the paper’s transfer, its financial situation and the possible closure, for instance. With the Post getting so much bad press lately, it’s no wonder he’s loath to welcome outsiders.

“There’s very little hierarchy here—there’s very little politics,” says Kelly. “I know it sounds like Management Speak 101, but it’s true.” On his first day as editor-in-chief, Kelly stood in front of the newsroom and offered everyone an open invitation to his office. It’s since become a mark of his management style. One senior editor, who doesn’t want to be named, says, “In a typical newsroom, office politics are cranky and clannish, the top ranks addled by un-firable cronies and hangers-on who did their best writing in the Trudeau era, and everyone wondering who has been admitted into the editor-in-chief’s inner cabal. There is none of that at theNational Post.”

Still, Kelly is difficult to read. During our two-hour conversation, he is both pensive and defensive, as though he has something to prove: “You know I usually go to those meetings, right?” he points to the one taking place outside his office. It’s less a question than a statement. The meeting is about Saturday’s edition, which is mostly formatted already. The next day, the lead story will be: “Is Jesus a Capitalist?” Hardly a departure from the Post’s trademark irreverence. Regular readers will notice a surge of marginal science (“In Denmark, only three Muslim women wear the burka, study finds”; “Smoking cigarettes, low back pain linked in study”) and feature stories both charming and absurd (a five-part series on human memory; a two-page spread celebrating National Punctuation Day).

Staff call the paper alternative, niche, contrarian, a dissonant voice amidst conventional views in mainstream media. As the house organ for climate change skeptics, its 27-part 2007 series, “The Deniers,” looked at scientists who “buck the conventional wisdom on climate science.” Columnist Terence Corcoran maligns the Suzuki Foundation and its “big green lies” and when FP editor-at-large Diane Francis wrote a column defining the planet’s real problem—overpopulation—her solution was novel: In a paper that promotes less government interface in almost everything, she suggested the universal adoption of China’s one-child policy.

Elsewhere, columnist Lorne Gunter laments an excess of political correctness that “will be the death of Western civilization” and Barbara Kay calls Mattel’s Burka Barbie a “travesty of multiculturalism.” Women’s studies courses, according to an editorial, have “done untold damage to families, our court systems [and] labour laws.” And a study, funded by a Florida-based Evangelical church, that suggested homosexuals might be “reoriented” made the front page.

Kelly says “robust opinions” are part of what makes a great newspaper. And with four pages of daily commentary, the Post is provocative, but also divisive. “Some people think there’s too much commentary in this paper. I suspect they’re not our readers,” he says. “And I’m fine with that.”

Critics hone in on the paper’s pro-Israeli bent, which they say translates to an anti-Islam agenda. Postcolumnists scoffed at pundits who denied a link between radical Muslim views and the shooting deaths at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. One editorial referred to Naomi Klein and the entourage of celebrities who boycotted an Israeli film retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival as “Palestinian Authority sock puppets.” Kay criticized Quebec politicians who attended a demonstration in support of Lebanon during its conflict with Israel in 2006. She argued that in a sovereign Quebec, “supporters of terrorism would find a place offering little resistance to burgeoning Islamism amongst its Muslim immigrants.”

This brashness gives it a distinct identity, but the paper seems conflicted in its geographic loyalties. As the only Toronto presence in the Canwest chain, it has a heftier city section than the Globe and sometimes offers more inspired local coverage than the crime and car crashes in the Toronto Star. Last summer, for instance, Peter Kuitenbrouwer wrote a walk-across-Toronto series, a tribute to the urban experience reminiscent of Jane Jacobs. And the paper’s blog, Posted Toronto, regularly adopts creative local angles.

But as a national paper without its own foreign bureaus, the paper relies heavily on Canwest for international coverage, supplementing this with in-house commentary. It also cut distribution in Atlantic Canada in 2006, prompting jokes about the paper’s dubious “national” moniker. Kelly was more concerned with fiscal restraint and the ultimatum: risk offending East-Coast readers or “slash the newsroom again and weaken the product for the entire country.” NADbank’s interim report says the paper’s print and online readership increased by four percent between 2008 and 2009.

For all the bleak projections, none of the employees I spoke to expressed concern over the state of the paper, even when Canwest teetered on the precipice of bankruptcy. It’s unlikely they’re in a collective state of denial: The paper’s been in worse shape—many with weaker stomachs left voluntarily long ago. The hard-core staff that remains is intensely loyal. Toronto editor Rob Roberts has been at the Post since its launch, and there’s a special status that comes with such stamina. “‘Us against the world’ is probably too strong,” he admits, without offering an alternative. But even a loyal following needs a leader.

***

Doug Kelly was born in 1958 and raised in Scarborough, Ontario. His father was a firefighter; his mother stayed home with her three boys. Kelly’s brothers aren’t part of the Post’s target demographic. Ron Kelly, a counsellor in community services, is a devout Green Party volunteer. Brian Kelly is one of the founders of Pollution Probe, a 41-year-old activist organization. He’s also a consultant and director of the Sustainable Enterprise Academy at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto—one of his specialties is climate change. Meanwhile, in a “Rethinking Green” series last year, Post headlines chanted: “Eat global, not local,” “Save the environment: Don’t take transit” and “How your blue bin hurts the environment.”

“I must admit I’m not a regular reader of the paper,” Brian jokes. “It’s not good for my blood pressure.”

Though he admits to “razzing” the editor-in-chief about his columnists, he’s careful (perhaps hopeful) to keep the paper’s ideology separate from his brother’s: “I suspect his heart is not entirely reflected by the views of the columnists,” he says, making a point of mentioning Corcoran.

Kelly became interested in party politics as a teenager in the mid-1970s. His close friend, David Hill, now an investment software consultant, remembers him as an NDP supporter avidly reading the biography of David Lewis, Tommy Douglas’s successor as party leader. Influenced by big brother Brian—already an activist—Kelly had a “fuck big American corporations” attitude that was fashionable at the time.

He was curious, but “wasn’t by any means the brightest kid in high school,” says Hill, who often helped Kelly with his homework. A veterinary school hopeful at the University of Guelph, Kelly dropped out after three months. (He’d gone on the advice of his guidance counsellor, who told him there were no jobs in journalism.) He then enrolled at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute where, as part of the journalism program, he interned at the Ottawa Citizen. The internship morphed into a full-time reporting gig. But since he pursued social antics more doggedly than his career, his colleagues underestimated him and editors assigned him accordingly. He earned the nickname “Shopper Doug” for his regular coverage of supermarket specials for the consumer section. And his general assignments were peculiar. “I call it the asshole beat,” says Kelly. “Every time they needed a reporter to embarrass himself, I, apparently, had a knack for writing that kind of story.”

When I ask him to name one, he leans back in his chair, hedging a bit. “Which ones do you know about?” he asks. Well, he covered an open audition for Playgirl magazine—by entering it. His audition photo ran on the front page.

He burnished that image out of print, too. One former colleague recalls a scantily clad Kelly jumping out of a cake at a birthday party. And there was an incident at the home of newspaper bigwig Murdoch Davis, a notoriously hot-tempered city editor who’d just taken charge of the Citizen’s early edition alongside Neil Macdonald. Kelly’s efforts to operate a hot tub without the host’s permission (it wasn’t a pool party) resulted in it splattering water like a blender without a lid.

A nice kid, if a little reckless—hardly a candidate to run a national newspaper, says Jay Stone, who was among the legions of former colleagues stunned by Kelly’s appointment as editor. Even Kelly says he’s never mapped out a career trajectory. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a classically ambitious person.”

But at dawn on March 12, 1985, he jumped out of bed when he heard an explosion. He lived across from the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa, where three Armenian terrorists had just wounded the ambassador, killed a security guard and taken 11 hostages. Kelly Egan, his roommate and fellow cub reporter at the time, went back to sleep, while Kelly rushed to the crime scene, arriving before the cops. Trapped within police lines before the ubiquity of cellphones, he couldn’t file his breaking story. He stayed to gather details from a prime vantage point and proved he could be quite enterprising, even if he did forfeit the front-page byline.

Egan, now a Citizen columnist, says there were other indications that Kelly aspired to greater things, including his decision to take the Canadian financial securities course, a prerequisite for stockbrokers—andFP reporters. Looking back, says Egan, it seems obvious that Kelly was preparing to move up in the industry.

And he met a girl: then-Citizen fashion reporter Nancy Gall, a stylish woman with quick wit and steadfast values—“conservative to the roots of her hair.” Even before they were married, Kelly dropped the leftist politics, took the proverbial lampshade off of his head and left suburban Ottawa to report on Toronto’s Bay Street. (For his part, Kelly denies that Gall had an influence on his political stance.)

***

In 1990, Kelly joined FP as a securities and Bay Street reporter. Five years later he was investment editor and, by 1998, when Conrad Black bought the paper, he’d already been named assistant managing editor. A year later, Kelly launched the paper’s own investment portfolio index. He expanded the breadth of coverage and helped define FP as an investor’s newspaper. This caught the attention of the Post’s founding editor Ken Whyte, who took Kelly to lunch one day. The pair came back walking elbow-to-elbow, Kelly adorned with a stupefied grin. Whyte had just made him assistant deputy editor of the newly launched paper.

Hand-picked by Black for the start-up, Whyte was widely respected in the newsroom. Despite a strident marketing campaign featuring cheeky billboards and cinema ads by the infamous theatrical producer Garth Drabinsky, the Post had difficulty securing initial advertisers. Still, thanks to Black, Whyte had a seemingly bottomless budget, lavishly bankrolled to the point that competitors were convinced rationality was no longer a factor in Black’s decision-making. Globe publisher Phillip Crawley was one of them. In interviews, he accused Black of pursuing his conservative political agenda instead of a business venture.

“The great thing about the Post at that time was that it didn’t want to be mired in rules or overly hierarchical and stuck in routine,” says Kelly, adding that it was also the paper’s weakness. “The operational stuff needed some work.” Assistant deputy editor was largely a thankless position—Kelly fired staff, tightened budgets and attended to administrative details.

Whyte left in 2003. His departure—along with that of his skillful Fleet Street import, deputy editor Martin Newland—left a management void. Few understood the new choice for editor-in-chief. Matthew Fraser was a difficult, acerbic man with little newspaper experience. By all accounts, he was not right for the job.

One Post insider says Kelly picked up the slack as Fraser’s executive editor, but by the time he took over as editor-in-chief in 2005, the paper was at the losing end of the newspaper war, hemorrhaging both money and talent. It had also burned through seven publishers in as many years (a period Kelly refers to as “publisher’s clearing house”), so it’s not surprising that he hesitated before accepting the job. The offer was oddly informal, like a scene from a mafia movie. Then-publisher Les Pyette “tugged on my ear, like this,”—Kelly grips his earlobe with a thumb and index finger—“and said, ‘You’re the guy.’ I told him I had to think about it.”

After a long pause, he clarifies, “Because it’s not a job that I’ve consciously gone after. I had to ask myself: ‘Is this in the best interest of the paper, if I’m editor-in-chief?’ I didn’t think long, but I didn’t say yes right away.” This loyalty to the institution, this company-man attitude, suited the Post’s circumstances exactly. “People were always coming up to me and asking me if I was okay, like I had cancer or something,” says religion reporter Charles Lewis.

Kelly took over a half-empty newsroom and, although the paper wasn’t doing any better financially, Lewis adds, “There was a palpable sense of relief, like, thank God.” For his part, Kuitenbrouwer told Kelly, “It’s nice to have a newsman back in the oval office.” Staff drank champagne at his inauguration, a throwback to all the free booze handed out over the years—the hair of the dog that bit them.

But the Post had lost the newspaper war, so did it even matter who was running the thing? Tim Pritchard,FP’s managing editor from 1995 until Black bought it in 1998, left acrimoniously (he sued for wrongful dismissal and won a settlement). He believes Kelly won the appointment by default. “At the end of the day you look around at who you’ve got. And there’s Doug Kelly, so let’s give him a shot,” says Pritchard. “He got where he is through a lot of stumbling on the part of the company.”

Apparently he gained his footing. After marking five years as editor-in-chief in February, Kelly has outlasted both previous editors (and three times as many publishers).

***

“Take faith,” says Kelly, unprompted. “Faith is interesting. It’s interesting intellectually, it’s interesting from a religious perspective.”

I’m sitting in his office at mid-morning on a Friday and I’ve just discovered that Kelly is more comfortable talking about the paper when he hasn’t been asked about it directly. Faith and religion are subjects the Posttackles regularly; in fact, it’s one of few Canadian newspapers with a religion reporter. One reader’s e-mail called the paper “a glorified national church letter” and Kelly relays the story with bemused pride. It’s a sign that the Post covers religion more fervently than any other mainstream daily. “The Star will do a religion segment on Saturdays and relegate it to one page with the Christian and the Jewish viewpoints,” he says. “I say put that up front.” An investigation at the Vatican involving the dwindling number of American nuns and a decision from Rome to allow Anglican practices in Catholic places of worship both made the Post news pages recently, the latter on A1. The paper’s online rendering of religion reports, Holy Post, bears the slogan “Get down on your knees and blog.”

Devoting a warm body to a specialty beat at an already shrinking newsroom is a risk, one with the potential to alienate secular readers—but Lewis has been the religion reporter since 2007. “A lot of people hate religion,” says Lewis. “Specifically, they hate the Catholic church. We recognize that a lot of our readers are religious, but we also recognize that these are important institutions. All the more reason to treat them seriously instead of like an oddity.” The religion reporter designation—as opposed to Stuart Laidlaw’s broader faith and ethics beat at the Star—is a testament to this, and to the paper’s traditional Western values. The Post ran a full-page image of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus on the front page last December 24. In the midst of political correctness during the “holiday season,” it was a blatant display of Roman Catholic iconography: religion with a capital R.

The Post is less tolerant of politically progressive faith—editorials regularly assault the United Church of Canada. When the Church’s General Council considered a proposal to support a national economic boycott of Israel, it touched on three of the paper’s pet obsessions—liberals, religion and Israel. In the following weeks, editorials attacked it even after the proposal had been rejected.

***

When I ask the Post’s longest-serving editor what his legacy will be, the weight of his thoughts seems to push him further into his chair, as if he’s never even considered it. “That’s a tough one…” Kelly finally says. “I think I’ve unleashed a lot of creativity… One thing I think we do particularly well is alternating story forms.” He gets up mid-sentence and, in three strides, retrieves today’s Post from his desk, spreading it out on the table and flipping through it. In his characteristic deadpan manner, he says, “Oh, too many ads, that’s a problem…”

He puts his finger down firmly on “Obama’s Options,” a page A17 headline about the United States president’s Afghanistan strategy. “Now, obviously Obama has a few options,” he says. “So we did this.” It’s a simple chart with bullet points outlining Obama’s alternatives, concerns and fears. The visuals are eye-catching and easy to digest, but hardly revolutionary.

Now standing and gesturing periodically, Kelly’s more animated than he’s been since we began talking, as if he’s making a formal presentation. “You can’t treat every story the same way,” he says, referring to a “sameness,” of which he believes the Post had previously been guilty. “Look back through the original issues. There are a lot of 16-inch stories. You can’t give everything equal weight.” Kelly reads the paper as if he’s standing over his own shoulder to determine which stories deserve a few words and which are worthy of extensive treatment. “Papers shouldn’t be a chore to read,” he says. “They should be surprising and heavily design-driven.”

In 2007, Kelly and his managing editor of design, Gayle Grin, revamped the Post in six weeks. And they did it all internally, which is, Kelly says, “the way we do things around here.” A cost-cutting measure, no doubt, since Conrad Black’s days of headhunting expensive, sometimes international talent are history. The redesign was the genesis of the paper’s front-page vertical nameplate, now a visual trademark.

The Globe’s last redesign, also launched in 2007, was two years in the making—and the Post has won more accolades for its unique aesthetic. It often resembles a magazine, which Grin says is the point. In a front-page feature about the hundred-mile diet, a huge tomato encroaches on the nameplate like a celebrity’s head would on the cover of Vanity Fair. It’s bright, simple and engaging. It looks like pop art.

Stephen Komives, executive director of the Society for News Design, says the organization gives the Postmore nods annually than it does any other Canadian paper—for substance as much for style. “Design is content,” he says. The Post is a paper “without a comfort level,” and risk-taking is something he notes while judging, in both design and storytelling. “They’ll blow out an entire front page for a year-in-review. They’ll go with one photo and few words,” says Komives. Sometimes they’ll use typography as art: A giant “0%” was the only graphic accompaniment to a front-page story about historically low lending rates from the central bank in the U.S.

***

Kelly’s seated again and I’m struck by the image of a psychiatrist’s office. There are plants in the window—part of the unobtrusive design—and a white-collar guy in a club chair staring into middle space while I sit, upright, taking notes. Kelly is alternately confessional while talking about layoffs (“There is blood on my hands and that’s something I’ll have to live with”) and defensive about corporate matters (“There are certain things I just can’t talk about”). The paper’s future is a sensitive subject that leaves him without comment, since it’s been only a few weeks since the transfer from Canwest CMI to Canwest LP. I ask him if there are any potential buyers. He says the paper isn’t for sale (officially), that it isn’t going anywhere. He tells me with a strange severity in his voice that he’s “genuinely optimistic.”

The Post has been subject to all kinds of apocalyptic predictions, each of them wrong so far. Before the official transfer, a procedural move already in place the night of the anniversary party at Betty’s, rival media jumped on one caveat in a 33-page court document relating to the move: the possible closure of Canada’s conservative paper. It was the first public admission from Canwest that the Post might not be around forever.

Two days after the media frenzy began, Kelly’s editorial appeared on the front page. “I usually don’t write editorials, but this one came out like lightning,” Kelly says. Entitled “The rumours of our demise,” it was a rant about the “firestorm of uninformed speculation” that, he believes, had subtext: Some news outlets wanted the paper silenced because of its conservative voice.

“I don’t begrudge the Star the right to seek an audience,” Kelly says, referring to the unapologetically liberal paper, which he argues would never invoke such positive feedback with its closure. Sure, the Star has critics (they’re probably Post readers), but there’s little evidence Canadians think they’d be better off without it. Kelly’s editorial, however, suggests the Post has a different reputation. It doesn’t appeal to everybody; it stirs antipathy. Some Canadians, he says, “didn’t want it to survive.”

But he can’t imagine the Post courting the widest possible audience. “Why would you want to do that?” he asks. “Aren’t we moving into an age of specialization? What you want is a loyal readership.” Make no mistake: The Post is not a general interest publication. That strategy, he says, makes little sense today. “The idea of speaking to a more select group of readers has been an anathema to the industry.” He cites FP Executive Blog, which showcases business practices, and Legal Post, which is directed at corporate lawyers. “That content doesn’t appeal to everybody, but it does appeal to a definable chunk of people and a desirable chunk of people.” Kelly says a discernable identity is crucial to online survival. “The Post is not in competition with the Globe or the Star. The Post is in competition, through the web, with all media. We’d better have a reason for being.”

Still, he believes the death of print has been greatly exaggerated, and the medium’s monetary value misjudged. The industry should charge more for subscription and single-sale copies, both of which have been “massively underpriced” for too long in order to boost circulation numbers. It’s a bold move to side with tradition in the face of massive shifts in the industry. Kelly won’t comment on potential paywalls, but says he plans to push more content online as readers migrate there. Web readership is up over 100 percent in year-over-year unique visitors, according to the paper’s vice-president of digital media. But, as Kelly points out, it’s a business of “not just how many, but who many.”

The Post has been carving a niche since its launch, when it targeted prime postal codes with free trial subscriptions. Former publisher Don Babick touted an early ad campaign for its irreverence—a dog peeing on a competitor’s newspaper box. He liked the ad’s message, saying, “If you don’t like us, piss on you. You don’t have to read us.”

The Post continues to court well-educated, affluent conservatives, now with more infamous editorials and fewer high-priced marquee names (former Post writers include Mordecai Richler, Mark Steyn and Christie Blatchford). Kelly plans to appeal to advertisers with the paper’s select audiences. At the business end, he and publisher Gordon Fisher are slowly salvaging a financial shipwreck. The last fiscal year saw single-digit losses of $9 million, which Fisher predicts will be less than $5 million by next year. It’s the best financial position the Post has ever been in.

During Kelly’s time as editor, the paper reduced its national distribution to focus on six major cities, reduced the number of news boxes on streets and temporarily struck Mondays from its publishing schedule to cut production costs. Like a low-profile antidote to Conrad Black’s grandstanding, Kelly has tried to maintain the original vision of the paper with none of the resources.

Still, there are skeptics. On the Post’s 11th birthday, I ask John Honderich, who was on the front lines during the newspaper war as publisher of the Star, if Canada still needs the Post. He laughs, and then goes silent before finally asking: “Well, how long can you run a money-losing paper?”

The Canwest papers are up for auction and by February there were a few suitors prepping bids for an early March deadline. After two decades at FP and the Post, Kelly will have yet another administration to contend with. That is, if he still has a job. After all, the paper has a history of revolving doors. For now, he remains stoic. “Everyone has a master, whether it’s a corporation, an institution, an individual or shareholders,” Kelly says. “So you have to operate within that. It’s out of our hands.”

Anxious to end a follow-up phone conversation, he asks: “Do you have many more questions? I’m trying to woo someone, job-wise.” He pauses and adds, “Yes, we do hire.”

***

On the Post’s anniversary at Betty’s, Kelly is a shadowy figure under the street light, balancing paper, a pen and a cigarette, smoke curling up toward his face. On his wrist is a Roots watch, inscribed: Your roots are at the Post. As Kelly scribbles away, he might be a stenographer, taking notes about forces beyond his control. Or he might be an architect, quietly drafting a blueprint.

Visitors to The Globe and Mail’s Toronto headquarters often comment on how sedate the place is—nothing like the frenzied, shouty bullpen newsrooms of pop culture. It’s more akin to a mid-sized corporate office; a grey and workmanlike place where serious people are engaged in serious work, putting together a very serious newspaper. So by Globe standards, the tempest gripping the office on May 25, 2009 is comparatively high drama. It’s mid-morning in the cubicle maze that’s home to the Review, Life and Report on Business sections. The loudest sounds are the click-clack of keyboards and hushed conversations. Suddenly, a gasp. And another. And another. The entire newsroom goes still for a few seconds as employees read the memo that’s just appeared in their inboxes.

“Eddie’s been fired,” one colleague explains hurriedly to another. “Stackhouse is the new boss.” Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief for seven years, is out. John Stackhouse, a 48-year-old Globe lifer, is in. A few hours later, the paper’s writers and editors assemble in a meeting room, spilling out of doorways and into the halls, to hear his first pronouncements. The crowd is expectant and uncertain. Publisher Phillip Crawley gestures to the back of the crowd and chuckles because reporter Siri Agrell, who’s on maternity leave and came in just to hear Stackhouse, has brought along her baby. Agrell responds dryly, “I figured she wouldn’t be the only one shitting her pants.”

Everyone laughs and Stackhouse lets his face break into a brief smile, but it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

The new boss has been at the Globe for more than 20 years, as a reporter, editor of the Report on Business section and editor of the national and foreign desks. Most of his colleagues assumed he was headed for the editor-in-chief ’s chair, but no one thought it would happen so abruptly or at such a turbulent time. In February 2009 the paper went through a huge round of layoffs and buyouts, cutting 10 percent of its staff. A few months later, tension was building between the union and management over contract negotiations and a strike appeared likely. Needless to say, the mood in the office wasn’t exactly buoyant. Reporter Michael Valpy, who’s been with the Globe off and on since 1966, says the last months of Greenspon’s tenure were a time of “tortured morale bruising” as the paper suffered one bad management decision after another.

After the switch came the gossip, all sotto voce, all focused on what led to Greenspon’s hasty departure. Possibilities included an overemphasis on Parliament Hill stories, Greenspon’s unpopular reassignments of several editors and columnists, his reluctance to confront the challenge posed by the internet, and even controversy over the Airbus affair. (The going rumour had it that Crawley was upset after Greenspon took it upon himself to fire off a letter to the Oliphant Commission. In it, he accused Brian Mulroney of offering to provide information to the Globe—on the condition the paper not reveal the former prime minister’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber. This came after Mulroney testified that the paper had suppressed a story sympathetic to him.)

But no one knew for sure what happened. The newsroom descended into as much chaos as the well-oiledGlobe possibly could—which is to say, barely perceptible to the average reader. “Reporters look to editors to tell them that everything’s going to be okay,” one former staffer says of those first few weeks. “No one had any idea who John was going to keep or let go. So you had reporters scared, editors who were scared, and everyone out for themselves.” And all that was on top of the general industry malaise. After all, Globejournalists aren’t the only ones shitting themselves these days. As the news business spirals deeper and deeper into uncertainty, everyone is feeling a little jumpy.

Not that Stackhouse will admit to any worries. In 2008, the Globe signed a $1.7-billion deal with Transcontinental Media, which includes access to the publishing and printing giant’s presses from 2010 to 2028. With a risky redesign in the works for the paper, Maclean’s senior writer Anne Kingston suggested the move could either be seen as shrewd, or “investing in state-of-the-art buggy technology at the turn of the 20th century.” But Stackhouse says he doesn’t buy the histrionics about the death of print. “The internet has been the best thing to happen to newspapers,” he insists —before quickly adding, “To good newspapers.” He’s convinced the way to confront the future is with a dramatic overhaul, and his vision is bold, especially for a 166-year-old institution: to become a multimedia news organization with a powerhouse web presence able to compete with industry leaders such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and a print edition that looks and reads more like a magazine- newspaper hybrid. It will be a high-end product for the paper’s high-end audience, and the stakes are enormous: The Globe’s business model is successful, if dated, and Stackhouse is betting the paper’s immediate future on an experiment. A carefully planned and calibrated one, but an experiment nonetheless. But in the face of the industry’s waning fortunes, he really has no other choice.

***

“I’ve been grooming John for this opportunity for a long time,” says Crawley. He’s less upfront about why the change came so suddenly, allowing only that it was time for a change after Greenspon’s seven-year run. “If you allow an editor to go on and on, it’s not good for the paper.” Rumours circulated that Greenspon appeared oblivious to what was coming as late as the National Newspaper Awards the Friday before his departure. Others reported seeing Greenspon leaving the newsroom holding his belongings in a bag and looking distraught. “You don’t want endless weeks and weeks of discussion and so forth,” says Crawley. “You’ve got to make a quick change and then move on with the new people in place.”

Historically, the Globe has always targeted Canada’s affluent “thought-leaders and tastemakers,” as its ad sales department boasts. Under Greenspon, there was a sense that the paper had been drifting by trying to appeal to “the whole reader.” The launch of the fluffy, faddish Life section in 2007 is an obvious example. But even the paper’s Ottawa coverage, traditionally one of its strongest suits, became softer, publishing whatMaclean’s columnist Paul Wells dismisses as “High School Confidential crap about which cabinet ministers weren’t talking to each other and what were the designs of the pumpkins at 24 Sussex at Halloween… Increasingly, the Globe decided it had to be stupid.” And unlike the National Post, he says, “It’s not even interesting when it’s stupid. It’s just stupid.” (Wells thinks that the paper has begun changing for the better under Stackhouse—though it still published a story about 24 Sussex’s pumpkins in 2009.)

Greenspon also made some deeply unpopular personnel changes. In November 2008, he moved features editor Cathrin Bradbury to news, hoping to jazz up the front section. But she was out of her element and left suddenly in August 2009. Queen’s Park columnist Murray Campbell, who had served the paper in one way or another since 1977, resigned last April after Greenspon killed his Ontario politics column and reassigned him to features. (He’s now director of corporate communications with the Ontario Power Authority.) He was an influential voice on provincial affairs and his departure wasn’t just a blow to the Globe, but also the press gallery at Queen’s Park. The move even earned Crawley a rebuke from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. Then long-time Toronto city hall columnist John Barber, who’d been covering the beat since 1993, asked for reassignment. He was hugely respected, and any replacement was bound to pale in comparison—but Greenspon chose Marcus Gee. It wasn’t just the former international affairs columnist’s conservatism that worried critics, but also his lack of nuance. (In February, for example, Gee entreated the blustering, buffoonish Toronto city councillor Rob Ford to run for mayor.)

Ultimately though, Greenspon simply didn’t fit with Crawley’s vision for the paper. The editor was an old-school newspaperman who believed editorial, advertising and promotion shouldn’t cross paths; the publisher wanted the entire organization to work together on a common mission and to share ideas and staff across departments. Crawley said as much in a jargon-filled memo he sent to employees just after Greenspon’s departure: “Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business. By drawing on the collective strengths of the team, we are all better able as individuals to contribute to the success of The Globe and Mail.”

***

Enter Stackhouse: a sober, serious journalistic workhorse who’d long seemed destined for the top job. (His first gig with the Globe was as a nine-year-old newspaper carrier. He saw an ad for the job at school one day and, since he was saving for a new bike, decided he wasn’t going to let any competition get in the way. He walked around tearing the remaining ads off utility poles outside the school.) His father was a professor, Anglican priest and Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament in Scarborough, Ontario; his mother was a public school teacher. Stackhouse grew up in what he remembers as a “mature environment,” a house full of books and politics. Even as a teenager, “there was nothing mischievous about him,” recalls Chris Liboiron, who worked alongside Stackhouse as a Queen’s Park page.

At Queen’s University, Stackhouse served as editor-in-chief of The Queen’s Journal, where he oversaw a major redesign, met his future wife and started on the path that would lead to the Globe. After one year in marketing and government jobs, he landed a summer gig at the Toronto Star. From there it was on to theLondon Free Press, The Financial Times of Canada, Report on Business magazine and finally to the newspaper itself in 1991, where he spent eight years as the development reporter in India. He’s also a two-time author (a hitchhiking journey from Saint John, New Brunswick to the west coast forms the narrative spine of his 2003 book Timbit Nation). He’s won a National Magazine Award and five National Newspaper Awards (NNAs)—including one for his “Living with the Homeless” series in 1999, for which he spent a week living on the streets in Toronto. The stories were controversial, earning praise but also condemnation for being gimmicky and demonizing the homeless (he wrote about alcoholism, the drug trade and panhandlers who maximize their incomes by fighting over lucrative begging spots). But it was also classic shit-disturbing Stackhouse.

Columnist Margaret Wente remembers her first impressions of him 20 years ago. “He was amazing,” she says. “He was exactly what you would expect. He was intense, committed and really, really smart.” FormerGlobe A-section editor Larry Cornies says, “John’s highly collaborative and very demanding of his staff.” He recalls that when Stackhouse worked as senior editor on weekends “the front-page lineup would be changing several times through the evening, to the great consternation of the copy editors, production editors, et cetera. We would tear down those pages and build them up again. It was frustrating, but it almost always resulted in a better paper.”

Stackhouse’s work ethic is legendary—as is his reputation for pushing others to similar extremes. Senior reporter Jacquie McNish remembers when he was in Indonesia in 1997, covering the Bre-X scandal (in which a Canadian mining company defrauded investors by claiming it had discovered vast quantities of gold). “He literally rented a boat to reach the mining site where this great gold scam was perpetuated,” says McNish. “He has that same drive as an editor. He expects all of us to get in that boat, to get into the heart of darkness and get that story.”

Things can be more difficult for those who don’t share his drive. One high-ranking former Globe staffer says that Stackhouse, for all his smarts, “has a problem dealing with people. He could make people feel like shit.” The same former employee says the editor lacks the empathy needed for leadership. “He can have trouble making up his mind. He lets the system produce stuff, then passes judgment on it.” Another former reporter describes Stackhouse’s around-the-office persona as that of a “scary, brilliant person who has won a bunch of NNAs.” Stackhouse’s reputation precedes him, and his office demeanour is a bit solemn, but let him warm up and his long, affably boyish face crinkles easily into a grin—especially when the topic of discussion is the future of the Globe. “A great newspaper needs to appeal to the brain, the eye and the hand,” Stackhouse says. “It’s got to be intellectually stimulating. That’s why we read it. It’s got to have a visual appeal that makes the eye dance when you turn a page. And it has to feel good.” His burning ambition, he says, is “to come in every day and say to my editors, ‘How can we destroy The Globe and Mail today?’”

***

Taking charge of the Globe’s most ambitious redesign in recent memory, Stackhouse must rework both the form and content of “Canada’s National Newspaper” in print and online. He jumped into the thick of it as soon as he took the top job, conducting a series of meetings with newsroom staff and flying out to the bureaus. Ottawa, for instance, now focuses more on policy issues and less on gossip. And the editorial department has been restructured so that business, features and news/sports are now the three pillars of the paper, each led by a section editor (Elena Cherney, Jill Borra and David Walmsley respectively). There are also three new groups— digital innovation, presentation (the redesign group), and recruiting and training—to break down the walls between the paper’s formerly divided departments.

But Stackhouse isn’t on a slash-and-burn mission. He’s a company man, after all, and he has a reporter’s approach to dealing with staff: curious and refraining from judgment until the time is right. An editorial meeting from November 2009 exemplifies it: Stackhouse arrives a few moments late to the boardroom. Inside, more than a dozen senior Globe editors fiddle with BlackBerries and shuffle through their notes. It’s a young, exclusive group, hand-picked by their new boss after he pushed out a number of old-guard senior managers to make way for “that sort of innovation we need desperately.” The new team includes Sinclair Stewart, a hotshot former business reporter and New York correspondent whom Stackhouse picked to be his national editor. Walmsley, formerly of the Star, CBC, Post and Daily Telegraph, is the new managing editor of news and sports. And Anjali Kapoor, just hired from Yahoo! Canada, is managing editor of digital operations.

This morning’s meeting begins with a presentation from Kapoor. She displays a spreadsheet on the projection screen at the front of the room, a compilation of the website’s most successful stories from the past weekend. Stackhouse listens carefully, taking notes occasionally, asking questions along the way. Tracking online readers is one of Stackhouse’s top priorities: who’s reading these stories, where the hits are coming from, when they’re coming in and from what kind of reader? While the redesign will move the print product in a more analytical and contemplative direction, the website’s mandate will be broader: breaking news, multimedia, archives and, yes, some balloon boy stories. One of 2009’s most-read stories was a piece about Natasha Richardson, the English actress who died while skiing in Quebec. (An editor called people.com and asked if it would like to link to the story.) Partnerships, formal and informal, are a major part of the new digital strategy: to get stories into the hands (and onto the screens) of “millions of new readers.”

Indeed, online readership is the only reason the Globe’s audience isn’t stagnating. The print numbers have been declining, as they have at most newspapers. The flagship Saturday edition, for example, lost 27,000 readers between 1998 and 2008.

The online numbers tell a different story: The year-over-year increases are dramatic. But more online readers won’t necessarily equal more money, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the news industry’s struggle with the web knows. That’s where high-end print advertisers come in—and faith that a viable online advertising model is forthcoming. What isn’t coming, at least in the short term, is anything like the paywall plan The New York Times announced in January. On the contrary, Stackhouse wants to develop more content-sharing partnerships, like the one with People. It’s all designed to push the Globe into a future that Crawley and Stackhouse are certain exists, the print-is-dead crowd be damned. “There are a lot of ideas from people who’ve never worked in the business,” says Crawley. “Many people have opinions and get some currency for them by putting them on their website, but a lot of them have never run a sweets store.” He adds that American and Canadian newspapers aren’t really comparable. “If you’re Clay Shirky in the U.S., you’re surrounded by a lot of papers that are not very good.”

***

Stackhouse’s strategy, simply put, is to be good. Maybe it’s premature to judge the Globe of the future based on the Globe of today, but there are hints as to where things are going. Any recent issue will do: say Saturday, January 30 of this year. On that day, the A section is solid—reporter Kirk Makin has a lengthy and intelligent dissection of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Omar Khadr case, and Afghanistan correspondent Sonia Verma writes a detailed piece about the difficulty of negotiating with the Taliban. Report on Business is strong, with a lead piece on why Canadians have access to so little information when house-hunting. Focus & Books provides the brain food and think pieces, and Sports is looking good, no doubt due to a glut of Olympics coverage, but also thanks to Stackhouse’s concerted effort on that front. (He brought Roy MacGregor back to the sports beat, with an emphasis on hockey, and several other staffers have recently been moved to sports, including Hayley Mick, who came from the Life section; and Darren Yourk, now the paper’s first online sports editor.)

But the front page is only so-so, leading with an above-the-fold story by Gloria Galloway and Daniel Leblanc about the prime minister’s grip on the Senate. Below that is a stand-alone photo of Canada’s Olympic flag bearer, speed skater Clara Hughes (the idea being that the Vancouver Olympics are a more female-friendly event than past Games). At the bottom of the page is a story on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder by Anne McIlroy. At first glance it resembles Stackhouse’s “reflective and analytical” paper of the future, but on closer inspection it’s not a very attention-grabbing front page, and it’s not necessarily any more interesting or thoughtful than the competition. The same day, the Star runs a front-page story on the government’s handling (or mishandling) of the Omar Khadr case and a feature story on child kidnappings in the aftermath of the Haitian earth- quake. In Montreal, The Gazette goes with a think piece on Haiti’s decline from wealthy colony to destitute post-colonial emergency state. At least the Globe beats The Vancouver Sun, which has a similar photo of Clara Hughes and no stories on A1 at all, just teasers.

In the Toronto edition, Globe T.O. runs a lead piece by Greg McArthur on the city’s recent spate of car-pedestrian collisions. The paper calls it a “data crunch”—six little charts with info on six different factors in collisions including age of victim, time of day, etc. The piece highlights the strengths and weaknesses of experimenting with new story formats. It makes crucial information much more explicit than a traditional story—in this case, a reader can see from a simple graph that the January accidents usually killed elderly people, not reckless jaywalkers. What’s missing is the meaning behind the figures. Three days earlier, city police had launched a ticketing blitz, issuing fines to pedestrians. Nowhere does the story take this raw data and use it to suggest that such a strategy might be ineffective. But to McArthur’s credit, he does make the point that the media blew the car-pedestrian story out of proportion.

Over in Focus & Books the presentation is better, but once again there’s ample evidence of the Globe’s struggle with non-traditional story formats. Some work well, including John Allemang’s Q&A with an American journalist and media critic explaining why coverage of the Haitian earthquake was off-base. Less successful is “The Matrix,” which very closely resembles New York magazine’s almost identically named back-page feature and places various current events on a grid of significance and media attention. It’s funny but forced, as if the paper is trying too hard to be irreverent and youthful. And the Globe, for all its strengths, is neither irreverent nor youthful.

What it does have is an imposing roster of brand-name reporters and columnists to ensure the blood is still pumping through its grey old veins. Christie Blatchford’s writing, especially on crime and justice, inspires both loathing and devotion, but her opinions are confrontational and her writing is powerful (although less so when she writes at length about her beloved dog). Ian Brown’s idiosyncratic musings make him one of the paper’s strongest and funniest voices, while his wife Johanna Schneller’s honest, down-to- earth celebrity profiles inject some intelligence into an arts department that too often seems like an afterthought (though it also includes some excellent writers, including TV critic John Doyle and architecture critic Lisa Rochon). London-based Doug Saunders, charged with covering European affairs almost single-handedly, seems to be everywhere at once as he dispatches his lucid missives from Britain and continental Europe. Elizabeth Renzetti is equally adept at covering European arts. Stephanie Nolen and Geoffrey York have earned near-universal acclaim for their work in Africa, and Nolen continues to bring the same award-winning standards to India. Graeme Smith is the paper’s bright young star on the international scene, earning both an NNA and an Emmy for the multimedia series “Talking to the Taliban.”

Rex Murphy recently decamped to the Post, a closer ideological fit for the world-class curmudgeon. (The move means less colourful crustiness on the Globe’s editorial pages, but also less amateur climatology. Murphy made climate change skepticism a favourite hobby-horse—redundant, since the popular and provocative Wente already has that beat sewn up.) Less happily, Rick Salutin is in danger of becoming the anti-Murphy. A younger left-wing voice might be in order, one not beholden to the 20th century’s brand of ossified socialism. In April 2009, the otherwise-intelligent Salutin lamented the lack of alternatives to global capitalism—a fair point, until he expresses nostalgia for the 1930s, when Stalin’s Soviet Union “was socialist and the bloom wasn’t yet off that rose.” Maclean’s senior writer Michael Petrou excoriated the column as “deeply creepy.” Meanwhile, Leah McLaren continues to write lighter-than-air puff for the Style section, including recent columns on “butt obsession” and why she won’t be reading any of the books nominated for Canadian literary prizes, a backhanded way of complimenting herself on all the classics she’s devoured lately.

The overall talent is enviable, but it’s not a panacea for the paper’s challenges. “The best thing the Globe has going for it is its reputation,” says Murray Campbell, who nonetheless fears it’s resting on its laurels and in danger of becoming a second read. “Foreign coverage has become episodic,” he says, “and it’s hard to follow a story that way. The tendency now seems to be to have a big feature from Doug Saunders or Stephanie Nolen, with a big display, and then everything else becomes a brief. That strikes me as a change. You used to be able to follow stories day in and day out.” He also believes that if management pushes news to the web, it will have to re-evaluate the competition. “On Ottawa coverage, is it going to measure up to the Ottawa-centric websites and blogs that are out there? For international, will it match the BBC?”

The focus on American politics also seems to come at the expense of national coverage. Between December 2, 2009 and February 2, 2010, the Globe mentioned Barack Obama 21 times in front-page headlines. Stephen Harper had his name dropped only 12 times. And the American president appeared in four front-page photos while our admittedly less-photogenic prime minister showed up just twice.

In the Globe’s favour, Stackhouse brought John Ibbitson back to Ottawa from Washington. (Ibbitson had been the paper’s political affairs columnist in Ottawa from 2002 until 2007, when Greenspon moved him to Washington despite what Cornies calls his “dazzling work in the nation’s capital.”) National affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson continues to weigh in with his temperate, intelligent perspectives on national affairs, and the paper’s Ottawa Notebook blog boasts eight contributors. Michael Valpy thinks that the overall quality attracts a “strong, progressive, intellectual audience,” though he thinks the paper could do a better job serving it. (As it is, the Globe’s editorial mandate is to focus mainly on advertiser-friendly mopes—managers, owners, professionals, entrepreneurs.) Despite all the strengths, the creative energy seems scattered. The paper certainly chugs along well enough, but the Globe’s focus seems to be elsewhere these days.

***

Mounted on the wall in Crawley’s office is a World War II–era poster that features a svelte blonde woman and three men leering over her. “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb,” it reads. “Careless talk costs lives.” Crawley and Stackhouse are indeed playing coy on details of this fall’s redesign. Different examples of what the new paper may look like have been tacked up on walls in the newsroom, attracting yays and nays from staff who have marked them up with comments and criticisms. And here in the privacy of his office, Crawley flips through the latest sample of what the redesign might look like. It’s a glossy, colourful sheet, a little shorter and a little narrower than today’s paper. A full-colour cosmetic ad takes up one whole page. “This is the kind of ad theGlobe typically wouldn’t get,” Crawley says. “Magazine-type quality and magazine-style print will enable us to attract advertising from sources that would normally go into a magazine.”

The Globe that readers can expect to see in the fall will have a variety of shorter and longer stories alongside more analytical pieces. It won’t deliver so much of what Stackhouse calls “classic institutional news.” Instead, it will assume readers already know about the basic issues of the day. It will embrace alternative story formats—charts, graphs, Q&As, lists, maps.

The idea, says Stackhouse, is to provide a “daily pause” of analysis and explanation, “that one time in a 24-hour period when we all need to stop and make sense of what the hell just happened in our world, our country and our economy.” He knows his paper increasingly competes on a global level, as Campbell suggests, and he’s also receptive to criticisms that the paper should broaden its audience. He maintains that “educated, affluent and influential consumers” are still the target market, but he’s also added a number of new beats—Jessica Leeder will report on global food, Valpy on ethics, Joe Friesen on demographics and McIlroy on neuroscience and learning— with the intention of widening the Globe’s appeal and offering that more analytical approach he speaks of so passionately.

And there may be other, more urgent reasons to widen the scope. Mathew Ingram, the paper’s former online communities editor, says “the whole concept of mass media is antiquated.” He praises the Globe for being “near the front of the pack” in terms of journalistic quality and internet savvy, but is unsure about the narrow demographic focus. “It makes no sense to think about our readership as having any common denominators at all.” Ingram’s work as communities editor—using the tools of the web to better engage readers—was innovative for the Globe. The policy wiki, a reader-edited website created in partnership with The Dominion Institute that invited readers to debate policy issues and propose solutions, was one attempt. Ingram also put together a more easily navigated site for mobile devices such as iPhones and BlackBerries. But he left the paper in January to work as a senior writer for an American technology blog network called GigaOm, and the paper has yet to fill his position. “I don’t think the Globe is mentally where it needs to be, and that’s one thing I regret about leaving,” he says. “I still feel as if we’re trying to pave cart paths, like we’re taking all the stuff we did before in a totally different medium and doing it online, and that doesn’t work. We have to fundamentally change the way we think about what our job is online.”

Ingram is far from alone in that assessment. Paul Sullivan, a Vancouver-based new media expert and strategist (as well as former managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and a former Globe western editor who still writes a regular column for globeinvestor.com), praises the paper for its journalistic excellence, and for being more progressive online than any other Canadian newspaper. But he says the people who run it haven’t really accepted the new reality of the news business. “They’re crazy about presses and buildings… They think of themselves as a newspaper based on Front Street. If they could just stop thinking that way, and think of themselves as an information wellspring based anywhere, they might find it a little easier.”

Maybe. The only things in greater supply than uncertainty in the newspaper business these days are cocky predictions about how the future will play out. Dilbert creator and occasional tech blogger Scott Adams predicted in 1997 that newspapers would be basically extinct by 2002. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2008 that within a decade, “there will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

But it’s probably far too early to really know whether experiments such as the Globe’s will succeed or merely stave off the inevitable; whether the $1.7-billion Transcontinental Media deal will indeed look like an investment in “state-of-the-art buggy technology” a decade or two from now, or whether the medium can be adapted, tweaked and made relevant for the future.

***

On a rainy evening in downtown Toronto, Stackhouse is a few minutes late for a panel discussion called “What’s Next For News.” Onstage, Clay Shirky compares journalism to ice harvesting—his point being that both are obsolete professions. Ingram and web critic Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, round out the panel. There are a couple of VIP seats cordoned off for Stackhouse and Crawley, but the editor slips unobtrusively into a seat near the darkened back of the room. Stackhouse is expressionless, balancing a small pile of paper on his lap and occasionally checking e-mail on his BlackBerry. He rests his head in his hand, rubs his chin, stifles a yawn or two. “My advice for young journalists?” Shirky booms from the stage. “Don’t work for The Globe and Mail.” Stackhouse looks up, the corners of his mouth lifting. A brief smile plays across his face. A few minutes later he rolls up his notes, tucks his BlackBerry into his palm, and makes for the exit.

With reporting from Ann Hui.

The Set-up

Definition: the premise of a pre-arranged outcome
A writer and an editor are lost in the desert. They’ve been without food or water for days, and it’s beginning to look like this is the end. Then, they see a shimmer on the horizon. They run toward it. It’s an oasis!

An editorial team is lost—or at least, wandering a bit in that editorial wilderness called brainstorming. It’s October 2008 and Cottage Life’s latest editorial package is in danger of being tinderbox-dry. Editor Penny Caldwell gathers her team of two editors and eight writers to sharpen ideas for the do-it-yourself package on how to be a cottage hero, slated for the June 2009 issue and set to feature more than 30 short service pieces. The last thing the team wants is a ho-hum execution. Enter David Zimmer, a frequent contributor and former editor, the guy readers love to hate for his brash and often-foolish style. Zimmer presents an idea to Caldwell about re-rooting a toppled tree—and how you can stash a dead body while you’re at it. Caldwell laughs. The idea is bizarre—not to mention morbid—but she is intrigued.

A few days later, Zimmer gets a call from his handling editor, Martin Zibauer. The story is a go. Several weeks and 159 words later, he delivers the expectedly absurd piece. To accompany it, the art department commissions a flight safety card-style illustration of a man dumping a limp body into a hole beneath an uprooted tree. The editors sell the package on the cover with a line that reads, “Hide a dead body.” Publisher Al Zikovitz gives the cover a once-over, not glancing twice at the cover line. He likes the controversial bit and gives Caldwell his approval.

The piece is a shift in tone from Cottage Life’s usual fare. Caldwell knows that. But she also knows it’s a fresh take on what might have been a dull how- to-save-a-tree piece. For the genteel editor, it’s a risk worth taking—a bit of absurd humour nestled snugly within a value-packed service roundup shouldn’t hurt anyone. In early May 2009, the issue goes to print and Caldwell thinks no more of it.

Being funny is something we Canadians are supposed to be good at. Think Jim Carrey, Dan Aykroyd, Stephen Leacock and a long list of homegrown and, yes, often-exported comedic talent. Still, not a lot of laughs find their way onto the pages of our magazines. Andrew Clark, a National Magazine Award (NMA) winner for humour and author of Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy, says our comedians have found success in radio, TV and film, but when it comes to print, the laughs are sparse because editors tend to “shy away” from humour. “I’ve never really been able to understand it,” Clark says. But humour isn’t easy (hence the theatre truism: dying is easy, comedy is hard). And while magazine editors often recognize its value as a leavener in what might otherwise feel like a heavy meal of service, profiles, features and investigative pieces, getting the menu just right takes skill—and some luck.

And last spring, Cottage Life wasn’t lucky.

The Act

Definition: an accompanying detailed description
The writer reaches it first and jumps into a lake of the cleanest, freshest, tastiest water he’s ever experienced. He gulps down the water and splashes around in it.

As Fielding discovered, crafting humour that hits the mark isn’t easy. Editors who take themselves too seriously are one problem. The typical editing process—circulating the draft widely so everyone can weigh in with suggested edits—is another. While that can work with straight features, with humour the comedic spark can get snuffed out along the way. “The whole thing’s been cleaned up, tightened,” says Fielding. “The language is beautiful and it’s dull.” Schatzker’s seen it happen to his own copy. As a satire writer for The Globe and Mail and frequent contributor to magazines including ROB and explore, he says most editors over-edit humour stories, almost to the point of “straight-jacketing” the jokes. One example: for a publication he won’t name, an editor assigned him an anecdotal piece, saying he wanted some quick-witted voice in the mix. But the editor then morphed Schatzker’s tone into what he felt was a more mundane voice, effeminate even. He didn’t see the changes until the piece appeared. Why did you come to me?  he thought. I’m funnier than you. What are you doing? He blames bad edits on editors’ dual impulses to avoid offence by softening the jab and avoid confusion by over-explaining the joke.

But the fact that Schatzker has steady humour gigs—like columnist Tabatha Southey at Elle Canada and Scott Feschuk at Maclean’s—makes his job easier than that of the untethered humour freelancer. A humorous piece is easier to pitch fully executed, rather than being boiled down to a query. For freelancers, the downside is the time and effort put into writing the piece literally doesn’t pay off if they can’t sell it. In August 2009, Anne Fenn, an nma winner for humour writing, wrote a piece poking fun at the trials and tribulations of sexless marriages. “The Joy of Scheduled Sex,” she called it. But actually selling it was agonizing. More passed because it had recently done a sex issue. Best Health had done something “similar” and Chatelaine wanted a humourless approach to the subject. In other words, a standard-issue feature. “I think the editors are afraid of offending their readers,” she says. “It’s sad.”

The situation is less dismal for humour columnists. Southey has been Elle’s funny gal for over six years and says changes to her columns are minimal and no topic is off-limits. Editor Rita Silvan hired Southey for her witty voice and gives her wide range. Why? “I’m dealing with a very talented writer who understands the brand.”

As a Maclean’s regular, Feschuk enjoys similar freedom, in part because boss Ken Whyte encourages his writers to use humour to provoke—not just in humour columns, but in serious pieces as well. Feschuk also produces a blog for macleans.ca where, in December 2008, he ignited controversy by adopting the character of the baby Jesus live-blogging from the manger. He didn’t hold back, ridiculing Christianity and the nativity scene. The piece prompted predictable outrage, with one insulted reader likening Feschuk’s hostility towards the religion to Joseph Stalin’s systematic starvation of the Ukrainians. Contentious or not, his editors were supportive—the piece attracted more attention than usual for the website.

Freelancers might envy the niches that Schatzker, Southey and Feschuk have carved for themselves, but other editors likely envy the magazines that have landed them. As any assigning editor will admit, humourists as skilled as this trio are few and far between. Since its 2007 launch, More’s monthly humour column has been the magazine’s trickiest slot to fill, says managing editor Sarah Moore. Rather than featuring the work of a single writer, she opens it to submissions from all of her contributors. And when her humour inbox is empty, she puts out a call to past contributors and brainstorms until the right topic pops up. Even then, it isn’t easy. “It’s really hard to go to somebody and say, ‘Write me a funny story,’” says Moore. “It’s easier for them to come to me and say, ‘I have a funny story that works for your magazine.’”

Moore’s frustration has a familiar ring for former Saturday Nighteditor Adam Sternbergh, now a well-regarded funny guy in his own right and an editor at New York magazine. Back in 1999, Saturday Night went through a redesign and added a humour section that mimicked The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs. It introduced The Passing Show section as a full page of laughs. “It just seemed natural that if you were presenting yourself as a national Canadian magazine,” says Sternbergh, “there should be some sort of element of humour in it.” But the staff struggled to find a tone that worked—and writers to deliver it. David Rakoff (who, like Sternbergh, is a Canadian working in the United States) kicked off the first column. The revamped section ran for only four issues before being spiked, and The Passing Show reverted back to its original “dryly reported tidbits.” Sixteen months in, that too was gone.

“The art of print humour is inarguably in a much weaker state now than it was 50 years ago,” says Sternbergh, adding the situation is similarsouth of the border, where it’s been more than a decade since Spy, the oft-mentioned model of modern satirical magazines, folded. Here in Canada, Frank’s Ottawa edition ceased publication two years ago (though the Atlantic version continues) and other mainstream magazines have reduced their already-limited humour content. In 2005, Chatelaine killed Judith Timson’s domestic humour column after 14 years. And Fashion axed Elizabeth Renzetti’s back-page column in 2004.

Clark accuses editors of a stereotypically Canadian crime: earnestness. “They don’t get that you could do a really serious article and use humour to make a point.”  Or maybe they just fear their readers will miss the point.

The Twist

Definition: an unforeseen development of events
Then he looks up. He sees the editor standing at the waterline. Instead of drinking the water, he’s pissing into it. “What the hell are you doing?” the writer cries.

Timing, as they say in comedy, is everything. And in Cottage Life’s case, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Just days before the issue arrived in mailboxes, police in Woodstock, Ontario, arrested two people in connection with the disappearance of eight-year-old Victoria Stafford. By the time readers started flipping through their June issues, a full-scale search was on to discover where the duo had dumped the girl’s body. Against that backdrop, some readers just couldn’t see the humour in a tongue-in-cheek reference to hiding a body.

And so, on June 2, 2009, Caldwell apologized on her blog for the “over-the-top bit of dark humour,” calling it an error in judgment. “I knew it was going to be slightly controversial, but it went further than I had anticipated,” she now says. “It was just one small story in the overall package.”

Even in the absence of such an unfortunate coincidence, readers’ reactions can be hard to predict. What’s snort-out-your-milk funny to one reader could be completely distasteful to another—but Clark argues if it isn’t offensive to someone, then it probably isn’t amusing to anyone. Back in 1996, Cottage Life came out with an illustrated cover by Canadian artist Joseph Salina of a naked woman cannonballing into the lake. A very slight tip of the butt crack was visible—an amusing, but hardly erotic, look at skinny-dipping by moonlight. Nonetheless, the magazine received a slew of letters from disgusted readers. But there were those who loved it—a Catholic minister wrote, “For God’s sake people, get a life. This is as funny as can be.” The problem is that anger tends to fuel more responses than agreement does. Still, publisher Zikovitz didn’t mind that controversy and doesn’t blame his editor for the most recent one either. “God forbid we ever publish magazines with no humour,” he says. While he regrets the timing of the dead body piece, he says it got people talking about the magazine. And that’s a good thing, even if some of that talk is unhappy.

Still, since most Canadian mass-market magazines need to attract a diverse audience to survive, it’s more challenging than ever to come up with humour that isn’t offensive to at least some readers.

That’s something that explore editor James Little discovered late last year when his magazine’s satirical piece on the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to let women enter the 2010 ski jumping competition landed with a thud. Many readers missed the joke, with at least five angry e-mails (mostly from female readers) crying sexism over a piece that joked about how dull it is to see fully clothed female athletes in any sport. Of course, that’s not what Little intended and he later had to spell out the joke on his blog, though unlike Caldwell, he refused to apologize despite threats from ready-to-unsubscribe readers. For a magazine that relies on paid subscriptions, it’s an uncomfortable position to be in.

But for publications that also rely on controlled-circulation like the now-defunct print edition of Toro, that worry, at least, is less of an issue. If a humour piece pissed off a reader, it didn’t really matter—the magazine still landed on the reader’s coffee table, or at least on their front porch, wrapped up in their Globe. According to former editor Derek Finkle, that liberation was one reason the magazine was able to experiment with more irreverence than most (although Toro still butted heads with the Globe occasionally). That, and the fact that the magazine was owned by an individual, rather than a risk-averse corporate entity, such as a printer or wireless company. Finkle’s unabashed gusto for impolite humour didn’t hurt either.

But those are conditions few magazines can match today. And with concern about shrinking audiences and book sizes in today’s advertising-challenged environment, risky humour content is often among the first to be cut: Due to space, Outdoor Canada pulled its annual Misdeeds & More roundup of bizarre news in outdoor life. The section had garnered attention in the past—the last iteration featured angler Mariko Izumi, wearing a t-shirt and bikini bottoms, sparking some readers to call it soft-core porn. And The Walrus, a frequent nmahumour winner, cut its essay-style humour features in 2008, with editor John Macfarlane saying he “just hasn’t felt the need for them.”

The Punchline

Definition: the culmination of a joke
“It’s okay,” replies the editor. “I’m making it better.”

While the audience reaction seemed gloom-and-doom at the Cottage Life office, Zimmer was uniquely placed to catch a glimpse of the opposite response. If it were up to him, he probably wouldn’t have issued that apology. He isn’t afraid to test his editors with outrageous ideas and foul language in his writing (though he didn’t get away with using “sucking face” in a story, a disappointing defeat). But like Southey and Feschuk, Zimmer has established himself as a reliable contributor over many years, giving him leeway to add that little bit of absurdity to his stories. “You’ll always get a handful of people who are shocked and appalled,” he says. “But that’s better than being ignored.” It takes trust, and Zimmer is confident that a reasonable reader would take his how-to piece as nothing but a tongue-in-cheek story. Besides, who’s got a dead body lying around?

The Payoff

Definition: the response, e.g. laughter, smirks, snorts, etc.
Insert your response here:

Not so shocking, either, is the biggest challenge editors have to face: accepting that there is no such thing as a guaranteed laugh. But a magazine that doesn’t even try? As Clark puts it: “Offend nobody, bore everyone.”

Only three people know what happened on that Toronto street on the night of August 31, 2009. One is dead, and the other two aren’t talking publicly until the trial is over, if they ever will. The best version of events the rest of us can put together is this: At about 9:45 p.m., the stretch of Bloor Street through Yorkville—a chic downtown neighbourhood and shopping destination—is quiet. A black Saab convertible heads west, a man behind the wheel and a woman at his side. They approach a cyclist, also heading west, and there’s some kind of minor collision. An argument ensues, escalates, and the cyclist ends up hanging off the side of the car as the driver hits the gas. The convertible veers wildly around a crew of workmen in the centre lane and into the eastbound lanes, with the cyclist still clinging to it. The Saab smashes against roadside objects—first a tree, then a mailbox. The diversion may have been intentional or maybe the driver lost control, but eventually the cyclist falls into the path of the Saab’s rear wheels.

Paramedics rush him to hospital, where he soon dies. The driver, meanwhile, sits in the back of a police car a block from the accident site; he looks bewildered, dismayed, disbelieving. He knows the storm that’s coming.

Within hours, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star run brief online stories about the incident, describing it as a hit and run. Neither names the driver, though speculation about his identity is already making the rounds. Just after 5 a.m. the next morning, 680News takes a chance and goes with the circulating rumour—the man in police custody is Michael Bryant, former Ontario attorney general and then-CEO of Invest Toronto, an agency that promotes the city as an international business centre. He’s a political showman—a former “cabinet rock star,” according to the National Post—who’d been returning from a night on the town when he was involved in a confrontation that ended with the death of cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard, a 33-year-old bike courier. It was a dramatic culmination of the increasingly angry, occasionally violent conflicts between drivers and cyclists that had dominated city streets and headlines all year.

As night turned to day in Toronto’s newsrooms, phones rang and inboxes pinged, a journalistic reveille rallying the incoming army of editors and writers. “It got pretty exciting pretty fast,” remembers Post reporter Matthew Coutts. National editor Scott Stinson roused him from bed at 7 a.m. and told him to get down to the police station where Bryant was being held. “Right off the bat it was all hands on deck,” says Coutts. “A lot of people get into journalism for that rush.”

Editors felt the same rush as reporters. “I shouldn’t call it a great day,” says Kelly Grant, then-Toronto editor for the Globe. “But when a story breaks that everyone wants to read and I have this stable of incredibly talented reporters I can throw at it, that’s not a bad day. That’s a great day.”

Unsubstantiated rumours quickly percolated through newsrooms—the dead man had been homeless, Bryant had been cavorting with a mistress, Bryant had been drunk. The pop culture allusion on everyone’s lips wasThe Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel about a Wall Street investment banker who runs down and seriously injures a young black man. “The dream was, let’s find the ritzy restaurant in Yorkville where Bryant ate and count how many bottles of expensive wine were on the table,” says Star city editor Graham Parley. “It would have been very sensational to find him drinking with some mystery woman before jetting off in his luxury convertible. You know, ‘What a story! Mmm, yeah!’”

The working theory was that Bryant, drunk on power and privilege (and booze, of course), possibly cavorting with a mistress, had killed a down-on-his-luck cyclist in a fit of road rage. “Newsrooms are famous for putting together a working theory,” says Larry Cornies, a former editor of the London Free Press. “We drive a story forward and make guesses as to what the next development will be. Ninety-five percent of the time we’re right. But not always.” Not this time. “In a crude way,” says Parley, “you could say we went looking for dirt and didn’t find anything.”

***

Over the next few days it became apparent that Bryant had actually been on an unexpectedly modest anniversary date with his wife, lawyer Susan Abramovitch, eating shawarma before grabbing some dessert and heading home. They consumed no alcohol. It wasn’t a hit and run, either. After Sheppard fell to the street, Bryant drove a block or so and pulled into the driveway of the nearby Park Hyatt hotel, where he called police.

And Sheppard, the Alberta-born Métis initially seen as a “merry warrior in the often intense subculture of bicycle couriers,” as Globe columnist Judith Timson described him, became more complicated as well. A friend told reporters he’d been drinking on the night in question and had ended up in the back of a police car after an altercation at his girlfriend’s apartment. He was also wanted on dozens of outstanding arrest warrants in Alberta.

Within a day, the Bonfire narrative looked shaky. Within two, it was pretty well discarded. Some observers attributed the story’s 180-degree turn to the machinations of Bryant’s communications firm, Navigator Ltd., hired just hours after the accident and almost invariably referred to in those first days as a “blue-chip” PR firm. (Senior partner Robin Sears was Brian Mulroney’s spokesman during the Oliphant inquiry.) Online, citizen journalists and cycling advocates worked to counter what they saw as a mainstream media smear campaign against Sheppard, boosted by Navigator. But reporters insist that the story’s turnaround was the result of old-fashioned shoe leather, good luck and nothing more.

Either way, the Bryant-Sheppard story proved that complicated, sensational stories don’t have to be journalistic debacles. That’s reassuring, considering that the mainstream media’s tendency to exploit flimsy leads, go-nowhere speculation and internet gossip (all rife in this case) has resulted in some appalling journalism. There are plenty of examples of what media pundits call “confirmation bias”: the readiness to report a story based on preconceived assumptions, accurate or not. In this case, it was new media outlets (YouTube and blogs, mostly) that twisted themselves into paranoid, judgmental contortions and did more to distort the story than to clarify it. Old media (print and broadcast) journalists made mistakes too, but by and large they kept up with the twists and turns. Most of the reporting unfolded in a credible and nuanced way. The biggest question in the aftermath is whether the success was thanks to good reporting, good luck or the guiding hand of a public relations firm.

The morning after the accident, 25-year-old Star reporter Robyn Doolittle received a wake-up call from her editor at around 5:15 a.m. She made it to the scene of the tragedy before 6 a.m. After poking around and talking briefly to some witnesses, Doolittle hailed a cab to the Traffic Services police station farther downtown, where Bryant was being held and would eventually make an appearance that afternoon. Doolittle remembers many of the reporters not-so-surreptitiously trying to dig up some dirt, probing for the name of the unidentified woman in Bryant’s car.

With only a small corps of reporters, the Post and the Toronto Sun were hampered during that first day, but the Star and the Globe were able to take a more aggressive approach. Parley deployed reporters to as many places as possible. They filed stories to the web while feeding extra information to Star reporter Cathal Kelly, who was writing a front-page feature.

By the afternoon, journalists were following three main threads: Bryant, Sheppard and the incident itself. Predictably, the papers with the most reporters on the story—the Star and the Globe—broke most of the new information. The Post, with fewer reporters, was unable to cover the developments as closely and adopted a more analytical approach. Navigator had shut down information from Bryant’s camp following a press conference the morning after the accident (for which the PR firm had Bryant change into a crisp new suit). Reporters then shifted their attention to Sheppard, who was turning out to be a far more complex character than anyone had anticipated.

“Not to boast at all,” says 25-year-old Star reporter Daniel Dale, “but I think I was the first to get a lot of stuff on him, and a lot of it was sheer luck. I messaged his entire Facebook list, and it was one of those days where people just get back to you. We also got stuff from his courier friends. They gave me his address.”

That address turned out to be a run-down apartment building on the east side of downtown, directly across from Seaton House, Toronto’s refuge of last resort for up to 434 destitute men. Rooming houses and smaller shelters cluster around it, while out on the street it’s a free-for-all—arguments, fights, drug deals. Few places in Toronto provide a starker contrast to Yorkville’s upscale environs.

Dale says Sheppard’s friends also volunteered that he was a heavy drinker. They thought it would make the courier seem more sympathetic, shifting blame to the police, who had come to his girlfriend’s apartment to investigate an argument, found he’d been drinking, and let him ride away. (Police said he’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk.)

The Globe’s chief librarian, Celia Donnelly, dug up a 2002 Edmonton Sun story mentioning dozens of outstanding arrest warrants for Sheppard. “Some days you get a name and it takes you nowhere,” saysGlobe reporter Kate Hammer. “Other days you get a name and it just keeps adding layers.” She  and veteran crime reporter Tim Appleby raced to verify that the Darcy Allan Sheppard in the Sun story was the same Darcy Allan Sheppard they were hunting. The crimes were minor. Sheppard was alleged to have cashed bogus cheques in small amounts to himself at local Money Marts.  The Star’s Parley says he wouldn’t have used that information even if he had it first. “The fraud charges have nothing to do with the Bryant incident. Why bring that up? To prove what?”

The Star scooped the Globe right back on September 3, with a story piecing together Bryant’s evening before the accident. This was yet another turning point. The story revealed that Bryant hadn’t been gorging on charcuterie and fine wine at a Yorkville boîte, but had been chowing on shawarma at a downscale take-out joint. His bill came to around ten bucks.

Most of the early reporting also included reconstructions cobbled together from eyewitness testimony, police reports and security camera footage. This is where the mainstream media did engage in some irresponsibly speculative reporting—none more so than CTV affiliate CFTO, which led the 6 p.m. news on September 2 with an absurdly hyperbolic reconstruction of the incident.

After playing some fuzzy security camera footage showing Bryant driving the wrong way down Bloor Street, reporter Tom Hayes wonders aloud, “Why did the luxury convertible cross over into oncoming traffic? Was the driver trying to shake the man holding on to the car, or was the driver forced?” Next, the broadcast cuts to a wide shot of Hayes in a parking lot, crouching beside a white convertible of his own. The handheld camera rushes in on Hayes as he barks, “There were reports that the cyclist was hanging on, possibly to the steering wheel.” Hayes clasps the wheel of the car. “Could this have made it difficult for the driver to turn right…instead having to go left into the opposite lane?” Here, Hayes jerks the wheel back to the left, pointing accusingly. There’s a cut back to the security footage as Hayes announces conclusively, “And that’s where the cyclist struck the mailbox and later died.”

The way the segment strings together fact, speculation and unsourced reports is awkward enough, but Hayes hardly even bothers to specify which is which. And eyewitness testimony, the source of all the reconstructions, is no silver bullet anyway. “Witnesses are unreliable,” says Carleton University journalism professor emeritus Joe Scanlon, whose research focuses on rumour dissemination after high-profile disasters. “They reconstruct what they think must have happened. Every time you talk to someone they change their story a little bit.”

The public appetite for new information was voracious. The following week also saw stories about whether or not Bryant had received a “VIP stay in custody.” There were reports on the hazards of urban cycling. TheGlobe’s Christie Blatchford wrote a column titled, “In a city of drivers and cyclists at odds, the one on the bike is always right.” In it, she argued Bryant “may well have a solid legal defence, [but] it is trickier to see how he will be able to muster a moral one.”

And increasingly, there was a focus on Navigator. Rick Salutin, a freelance columnist for the Globe, is disdainful of PR. He fears that with spin doctors involved, the reporting becomes dubious. “It’s grossly unfair that if you have a lot of money you can hire people to spin your case,” he says, “and if you don’t, you’re largely at the mercy of those who do.” But reporters and editors insist they had no contact with the PR firm and respond to any suggestion otherwise with incredulous denials—of course we didn’t talk to Navigator, they say. Maybe someone else did, but not us.

On September 3, Star reporters Kenyon Wallace and Nick Kyonka put together a detailed chronology of Bryant’s evening. Someone, described only as “close to the family,” told Parley that Bryant and Abramovitch went for shawarma, then drove over to the east end for a walk, before finally getting dessert and heading to Yorkville. Kyonka and Wallace visited every destination, quoting one waitress who refused to be named, and another who gave only her first name. Both reporters were interns at the time, and neither knew who the original source was. (Parley won’t disclose the name.)

At first glance their story is indeed suspicious—unnamed sources, an angle sympathetic to Bryant, coming just as the weight of public sympathy was beginning to shift. “I just think it was a plant from the PR firm,” says Peter Kuitenbrouwer, Toronto columnist at the Post and acting Toronto editor at the time. “It was really frustrating because they obviously had access to Bryant. And with an unnamed source, how do you even know it’s true?”

But Parley refutes any suggestion of Navigator’s involvement. “If I were [Navigator chair Jaime] Watt I’d be delighted, because he’s getting credit for a lot of shit I don’t think he had anything to do with.” Parley says the original source didn’t approach the Star. Instead, editor-in-chief Michael Cooke came into the morning news meeting on September 2 and insisted on learning everything Bryant had been up to before the accident. So they started making calls.

Plan B was to deploy reporters around Yorkville to suss out Bryant’s whereabouts, an approach that obviously would have turned up nothing. “It would’ve been a better story for us if he had been drinking,” says Parley. “No question we were going out there with a bit of gotcha in mind, and the facts were the opposite of gotcha.”

On the morning of Tuesday September 1, Bryant was the villain and Sheppard was a near-innocent victim. By Wednesday evening, they’d almost switched roles. Sheppard’s image had been tainted by stories of a troubled past, police encounters and reports of alcoholism. Bryant’s image had been burnished—mainly in contrast to Sheppard. And though no one will admit to speaking with the PR company, Watt tells a different story. “Things were being reported that were not true,” he says. “That Bryant left the scene of the accident, that he was drunk, that he would be in court on October 19 when it was just an initial appearance by his lawyer. If we’d let them go they would’ve set like cement.”

Watt is unabashed. Of course the agency spoke to journalists. And it did so because the working theory, as Cornies might call it, was leading reporters down a distinctly one-sided, anti-Bryant path. “We did what we needed to do to change the dimensions of the story, and then we stopped talking,” Watt says. “We know that journalists and newsrooms have been the subject of huge cutbacks. We have more general reporters working on more topics, and we have a huge pressure to file quickly. So there are lots of examples of pack mentality setting in.”

Navigator was most interested in what would make its client look good. But that may not have been too far from the truth. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that the story became more accurate after the PR people got involved,” says Ira Basen, producer of CBC Radio’s Spin Cycles, a documentary series about the intersection between PR and the press. “That would only surprise you if you thought they were there to be untruthful. And sometimes they are. Not outright liars, but they speak through what I call a sort of managed truth. But sometimes that’s very close to the absolute truth. Hopefully journalists don’t need PR people to turn them in the right direction,” he says. “But we all have our blind spots.”

Within 24 hours of the incident, members of the cycling community rallied hard to correct what they saw as a smear campaign against Sheppard. Donald Wiedman, a PR professional and cycling advocate who took up Sheppard’s case pro bono, says the public was “duped with Navigator’s help.” He even set up a Twitter feed called Bryant Truths, a counter to Bryant Facts, Navigator’s feed that operated alongside a blog of the same name. (Navigator rarely updated those accounts, though for the rest of the year there was predictable hyperbole about Twitter’s importance—the December 2009 issue of Toronto Life even included “political damage control by tweeting” as one of the “25 Ideas That Are Changing the World.”)

Mess Media, an activist website that claims it “corrects media reporting errors” in stories on bike couriers, set up the Bryant Watch blog, featuring posts about Watt’s own 1985 fraud conviction. The site strongly alleged that Navigator was feeding the press with anti-Sheppard information. Mess Media complained about biased coverage, but much of what the site reported was impossible to prove and patently libelous. “Bryant lost it,” reads a post from December 7. “He was overtaken by complete rage. If he had a gun he may have shot Al in the back. If he had a bat he may have bashed Al’s head in from behind.” Another blog, The Bike Joint, dubbed Bryant the “butcher of Bloor Street.”

Wiedman was also in touch with another, more mysterious activist, who goes by the moniker “honestedits” and who will only describe himself as working in the “information technology sector.” “Who else would risk speaking against the powerful than the anonymous?” he asked via e-mail. He alleges that television reports chopped up the security camera footage and presented it out of order. His “improved footage” YouTube videos, complete with annotation explaining what’s happening onscreen, were posted days after the accident and received over 40,000 hits.

Some bloggers were more scrupulous. In Torontoist’s year-end round up, Hamutal Dotan wrote, “It would behoove us all to sit down, shut up, and let that justice system do its job. None of us knows what precisely occurred that night: the specifics…ought not to be a matter on which we speculate, theorize, emote, or onto which we graft explanations as they suit our world views.”

***

The Star’s Doolittle has another theory as to why the Bryant-Sheppard coverage, after a shaky start, turned out relatively well. She thinks the story of Victoria Stafford, an eight-year-old girl kidnapped in Woodstock, Ontario, made reporters and editors a lot more cautious about jumping the gun on breaking news. “I think Tori Stafford was a teachable moment in newsrooms across this country.”

On April 8, 2009, an unidentified woman kidnapped Tori as the girl walked home from school. A security camera at a nearby high school captured her leaving with the abductor. It was the last time Tori was seen alive—three-and-a-half months later, police found her remains. The abduction created a speculative bubble that imploded in an especially embarrassing and appalling way. “We always do our best to avoid preconceptions,” says Doolittle, “and we know the dangers of them, and we sometimes get these reminders of those dangers.”

Though estranged, Tori’s parents Tara McDonald and Rodney Stafford came together to appeal to the media and the community for their daughter’s safe return. As the days and weeks went by, there was little news about Tori’s whereabouts or the perpetrators, but there was still plenty of public interest. So attention shifted to Tori’s parents—their strained relationship, McDonald’s OxyContin addiction and a trust account she set up, which some speculated was an attempt to profit from the tragedy.

“It’s seldom that you have a parent like Tara McDonald making herself so available,” says Cornies, now a columnist for the London Free Press, one of the major newspapers closest to Woodstock. “Most people in that situation are shell-shocked and grief-stricken into hiding, but Tara was inexplicably almost brave and in front of the cameras and microphones daily. And because that was such a departure from standard behaviour amongst parents of missing youth, all the alarm bells start to go off among reporters: ‘Why is this parent so different?’ And then the theories begin to spin out.”

In the Stafford case, the working theory was that Tori’s mother was losing her grip on sanity and was maybe even the kidnapper. In the information vacuum that enveloped the case, there was little to substantiate that, but little to disprove it either.

The nadir of the Stafford story came on April 21, when police released a composite sketch of the woman in the school video. Some comments on a Facebook page speculated it resembled McDonald. The flimsily sourced rumours made it into newspapers across the country, which reported the allegations and McDonald’s denials.

This whole sordid soap opera continued until police arrested Michael Thomas Rafferty and Terri-Lynne McClintic on May 20. Cornies wrote an editorial for the Free Press after the discovery of Tori’s body that concluded with the news of a funeral. “We’re not invited,” he wrote, referring to the media. “Nor should we expect to be. But…it seems right that we should encircle McDonald and Stafford now—in solidarity, in sorrow and in abject apology.”

Montreal-based media critic Craig Silverman thinks it was a textbook case of pack reporting, exacerbated by the expectation that public interest must always be met with more coverage, whether there’s anything new to report or not. “It is so intense when something happens and the details are sketchy, but you’ve got to write about it,” says the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. “The idea that we could stay silent when the competition is out there reporting things takes an incredible amount of self-control because you want to beat your competitors.”

After all, says Kelly Grant, the goal when reporting a breaking story is, “To report the hell out of it, to talk to as many people as humanly possible, to take any suggestion that could be controversial and just report the shit out of it.”

Silverman thinks the Stafford case is an example of “confirmation bias,” as were the early stages of the Bryant-Sheppard story. “Once you’ve decided what’s happened, you’re going to write to that,” he says, “and if something is reported without due diligence, it’s going to spread because people will not have the self-control to stay away from it, and because the news cycle is so quick right now.”

In 2006, for example, the Post reported that Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians living in Iran would have to wear ID badges reminiscent of those worn by Jews in Nazi Germany. The paper ran the piece on the front page even after a rabbi at New York’s Simon Wiesenthal Center said he couldn’t confirm it, though he believed it to be true. The New York Post picked up the story, but it turned out to be a complete fabrication. “It seemed like it could be true. It fit certain perceptions of what Iran might do, so it was believed easily,” says Silverman. “But it was entirely made up. They went with it because they wanted the scoop.”

***

Reporters chased down a lot of scoops during the first week of the Bryant-Sheppard story, and in the beginning they were thrown off by a lot of glib assumptions and false innuendo. In the end, though, a more complicated and probably more truthful story emerged. Maybe it really was just diligent reporting. Maybe it was simply that reporters kept finding new information and didn’t have the time to report idle speculation.

More troubling is the suggestion that the PR spin may have inadvertently kept them honest. Even if Navigator wasn’t behind the story about Bryant’s night on the town, it’s possible that it was behind some other reported details, or that the move to shut down communication from Bryant’s camp forced reporters to look into the other side to keep feeding the public appetite. “That made a lot of people turn toward Sheppard,” says Matthew Coutts. “It didn’t take much to find out about his past and family in Edmonton, and you had Bryant’s story coming out in a far more controlled manner.”

The coverage wasn’t an unqualified success. There were those initial reports of a hit and run. There were too many irrelevant, salacious stories about Sheppard’s past, too many dubious reconstructions of the accident and there are still too many questions. There are also hints of PR meddling on the day Bryant emerged from Traffic Services. The Globe’s Tim Appleby says that an unidentified man insisted photographers turn their cameras so the police station would be out of view and Bryant would appear against a bright blue morning sky instead. (“I don’t know anything about that,” says Watt.)

But the mainstream media’s missteps pale next to the blogosphere’s. “When I started doing this, the media controlled information,” says Appleby. “People got their information from the mainstream, and that’s absolutely not the case anymore.”

He believes that civilian journalism is both good and bad. “Probably more good than bad,” he says. “But the bad thing is that everyone has an opinion. And it’s harder and harder to separate the real from the imagined.”

Outside, a C-130 Hercules whines on the runway—probably American, thinks Matthew Fisher, a Canwest correspondent. He’s inside the Canadian media tent at the Kandahar Airfield in mid-January, telling me about the old days of war reporting. His tone is matter-of-fact, the result of working in over 14 war zones in 25 years. Back in the Balkans, Rwanda and Iraq, dead bodies littered the streets. There were no friendly forces in Rwanda. Forget about electricity, food or drinking water. You couldn’t jump into a conflict zone and call yourself a war correspondent. You had to prove yourself. In comparison, he says to me, Afghanistan is the “Cadillac” of war zones. “War reporting lite,” he calls being embedded. “It’s laid out like a banquet. There’s a way to file, internet’s provided, there’s electricity, there are meals.” A jet—an Aleutian 76 transport, he can tell from the reverse thrust—lands, interrupting his musing.

Fisher’s chatty mood is in stark contrast to two weeks earlier, when the 55-year-old veteran war reporter rushed back to Kandahar from Ottawa after his colleague and temporary replacement, Calgary Heraldreporter Michelle Lang, was killed along with four Canadian soldiers in a landmine explosion. In the following weeks, many, including Fisher, found solace in the knowledge that Lang—driven, curious and passionate about telling the stories of Canadian soldiers and Afghani citizens—had volunteered to go to Kandahar “for the right reasons.”

That, of course, implies that there are wrong ones. Fisher sees war reporting as a dichotomy: there are old war correspondents—vets who’ve slept in cars and dodged Molotov cocktails—and rookies. But nothing is ever that simple. There are no right or wrong reasons. Motivation to go to war, like all motivation, is complex. Yes, every journalist is there to do a job, but some also do it for ego—the glory, to say they’ve done it. Some do it in hopes of career advancement. And others are adrenaline addicts, going from conflict to conflict looking for a bigger high. Self-interest can affect coverage—reporters driven by ego are less likely to stay for the long haul. But judging one reason against another doesn’t make sense. Just as wars aren’t won based on morality, we judge journalists by their work, not their motivations.

When I first heard about Michelle Lang, I thought, “In a few years, that could be me.” As a young journalist at the beginning of my career, I wondered how I’d react if an editor asked me to go to Afghanistan. I hoped that by talking to others who’d gone, I could understand how to make the same decision for myself. Because unlike law enforcement officials, firefighters or soldiers, risking our lives is not part of the contract. Yet journalists do it. Many even yearn for the chance, and I wanted to understand why.

* * *

Brian Stewart became a journalist to work as a foreign correspondent but, now, driving in the El Salvador countryside in the midst of a civil war, he’s scared to death. It’s the early 1980s and he’s in the middle of what he calls a war of murder. Every day, right-wing death squads are hunting and massacring local peasants and villagers. They’re targeting reporters, too. A four-person Dutch TV crew has just been killed. Before that, three American nuns were raped and murdered. It’s a weird sensation, driving out toward danger rather than away from it. He’s careful to return to the capital by nightfall. Staying on the roads at dark is suicide. Some days, he curses ever taking this job.

Long before Stewart set foot in El Salvador and long before Lang landed in Kandahar, war reporting was dangerous. Ask the 66 journalists who were killed covering World War II, according to Freedom Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based press advocacy organization. Ask the 12 killed in the Philippines last November by gunmen in a single roadside massacre. Some were mutilated before they were murdered; others simply beheaded. Closer to home, ask Mellissa Fung, who was kidnapped by bandits and held in Afghanistan for almost a month. Even if you’re not captured or killed, you see things. Smell things. You leave with scars.

War reporters aren’t extraordinary people. Fung grew up in Vancouver, wrote for the same student paper I did at the University of British Columbia, then studied journalism at Columbia University in New York. Lang, whose parents named her after the Beatles’ song, was a graduate of Simon Fraser University, where my sisters went to school, and was excitedly planning her wedding. They’re ordinary people, lying on their cots, hearing the jets overhead and thinking, “What have I gotten myself into?”

 * * *

Reporters in Afghanistan love to talk about accountability, one of those right reasons for going to war. By the end of February, Canada had lost 140 soldiers in Afghanistan. And by the end of the mission in 2011, we’ll have spent at least $12 billion doing it. “There’s been so much blood and treasure extended in Afghanistan by Canada that there has to be some kind of reckoning, some kind of accounting of what’s transpired here,” Fisher says. He hears all the time that Canadians feel they don’t know enough about what’s happening there. I tell him I’ve heard the same.

Others talk about bearing witness—the instinctual, almost perverse voyeuristic desire to see the big story. After all, war is inherently tragic. Inherently dramatic. And curiosity is, without a doubt, part of a journalist’s makeup. Reporters who grew up reading Ernest Hemingway’s war coverage—he stormed Omaha Beach with the American troops and took up arms in Rambouillet in World War II—may crave the adventure they’ve read about. “I wanted to see it with my own eyes and taste with my own tongue, what was going on,” Canadian Press reporter Colin Perkel says. Bob Bergen, professor at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and former military journalist, calls this the Siren song. “It’s a terrible song,” he says, “but you want to hear it… It’s a terrible beauty.”

Accountability, curiosity—the reasons everyone talks about. But I can’t help but doubt how comforting they’d be if I were sleeping on the floor in a town I’d never heard of. Or lying in a hotel crammed with 500 journalists all trying to scoop one another. Accountability? Not very comforting when bullets are flying.

Stephen Thorne covered the Kosovo War for CP and did three stints in Afghanistan before his bosses transferred him back to the copy desk in Ottawa. War reporting was his calling. Afghanistan was a chance to do something important. But there’s also the adrenaline rush. In 2002 in eastern Afghanistan, Thorne was the only daily reporter on board a CH-47 Chinook helicopter with a Canadian reconnaissance team of eight. They ended up finding a bunker and cave with Taliban inside. Someone called in U.S. forces. One hundred troops. One hundred metres away. They blew a guy’s head off. All the while, Thorne was on the phone with the radio desk, doing a play-by-play. It’s addictive.

For some correspondents, war becomes all that they know. They embrace this addiction, substituting conflict for normalcy back home. Many of them pay for it, too. Thorne suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Then his wife left him. “It was worth it, I guess. I didn’t want my wife to leave me, but that’s life.”

* * *

It’s 1965 and Cliff Lonsdale is 20 years old. He’s been reporting since he was in Grade 10, but England’sSouthern Evening Echo has just given him a big break. To the guys in the newsroom, he’s the new kid. Hiseditor approaches him one day: a car accident. “Go see the mum and get the picture.” Great. Another one of those tests. A knot forms in his chest as he knocks on the door. A woman answers. “Yes?” she asks brightly—smiling, even. She doesn’t know yet. He tells her, and she collapses. He wishes the world would open up and swallow him whole. Instead, he leaves with a picture.

Back at his desk, he hears two of the older reporters talking. “Hey, did you hear what happened to the new guy? Got the picture anyway. He’s one of us.” Lonsdale wants to say something, but instead shuts up and keeps writing. Part of him is pleased. “Oh good, they think I’m tough,” he realizes, not entirely bitterly.

“Macho” may be a sexist, passé term, but the sentiment remains. Journalists—often younger journalists—want to prove themselves. And that can be a dangerous dynamic: Vets tell us that time in a war zone will help our career. Maybe keep our jobs, even. And in a tough time for the industry, it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal: Take on this risk and earn some credibility in the newsroom. A six-week rite of passage? Not so bad, some of us figure.

* * *

But this notch in the belt comes at a price. Soldiers know the difference, vets say, and when a rookie enters the field unable to tell a major from a sergeant major, all journalists lose credibility. When a gung-ho type enters the field unprepared or unaware of the risks, everyone is at risk. And when a correspondent enters the field with little interest in war reporting, coverage suffers.

The Canadian Forces Media Embedding Program sets out strict criteria for incoming journalists. In addition to bringing mandatory items (a Kevlar helmet, level IV body armour with ceramic plates, ballistic eyewear and their own eating utensils), reporters embed for a fixed time—in most cases, about six weeks. The military says those who stay longer tend to burn out. True, maybe. But short stints are also in the forces’ own interest: experts, after all, ask tougher questions.

The real problem lies not simply in the gung-ho or the self-promoters. After all, as Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford tells me, “It’s not like they go as tourists. They work when they’re there.” But those only interested in punching their ticket are more likely to do just the one rotation, then never return: “parachute journalism,” in other words. “What this story has badly needed is people who saw it in the beginning, saw it in the middle stages and now see it in the latter stages,” says Fisher. “That’s where you really get an understanding of what’s happening. If you just come here once for a few weeks, you don’t get that sense. Afghanistan is a hugely complex environment.”

As with any beat, reporters who are familiar with the players and issues do the best job. But war correspondents often don’t pass on their knowledge once they return home and incoming reporters must fend for themselves. “Journalists are like cats,” Bergen says. “A cat lives a life and it dies, and another one starts and it’s no wiser for being there.”

Well aware of this problem, large media outlets assign reporters to be there “permanently” (often six weeks on, six weeks off): Fisher for Canwest, James Murray for CBC, a small group of reporters rotating one at a time through the country for CP and, until last year, Paul Workman for CTV and Graeme Smith for the Globe. Despite this, there’s no easy fix. Fatigue is a real problem. Most of the vets from past wars didn’t have to deal with a 24-hour news cycle, or filing for the web, radio and television along with print. Older correspondents had time to work and time to rest. Plus, asking journalists to essentially abandon their lives for years at a time is, admittedly, a hard sell. A single six-week rotation is one thing, but doing it for years on end, as Fisher has done since 2002, is a different challenge entirely.

* * *

For reporters simply out to get a victim’s picture, the motivations have little to do with moral duty. After working at the Toronto Star and the Victoria Times Colonist, I know, because I’ve done it. When reporters break a political sex scandal, the public’s right to know may be part of the motivation. But it’s not the only one. Selling the newspaper, scooping the competition or simply raising your own A1 count are just some of the others. And as long as your work is good, no one in the newsroom will question your motivations.

Sure, journalism is crucial for a functioning democracy, and some of the best work exposes injustice, corruption and gets people talking about important social issues. But the daily stuff-—the nitty gritty “I’m-working-to-deadline-and-nobody’s-calling-me-back” stuff—that’s about fear and ego. That’s about “I have to get this interview. I have to get a quote. I have to at least match what the other guys had.”

When reporters are five minutes from deadline, behind on a story and have an editor breathing down their necks, how many can say they’re thinking about the public’s right to know? I certainly can’t. I’m thinking about saving my own skin. I’m thinking, “I hope the editors won’t think less of me if I don’t get this story.”

Maybe that’s not what journalism is supposed to be about, but that’s what daily newsrooms are like.

When it comes to motivations to do almost anything, that “public’s right to know” is almost always on top of the list. And no one’s lying—most of us believe it. We like to believe we’re doing good. But the in-the-moment reasons are often very different from the big-picture reasons.

Not to say that one is better than the other. Calling some reasons right and others wrong is simplistic. Newsrooms don’t reward morality over all else. Some journalists will point their fingers at others—“bang-bang journalists” who create pornography of violence and death, for example—as being reprehensible. But the bang-bang journalists show us the gruesome realities of war.

Separating one human impulse from another is impossible—like pinching at a tightly wound spool of thread. There’s no point. They’re connected. Same with soldiers, aid workers and anyone else drawn to war: the reasons are varied and convoluted. Even for those journalists who claim they’re going to war for the “right” reasons, there’s almost always ego at play. Many journalists say they want to see Afghanistan with their own eyes. It’s genuine curiosity and passion, they say: a right reason. But why them? It’s not just that they believe the war is the biggest, most important story; they also think, “I deserve to be the one telling this.” Pure ego.

Many of the vets say they went to war for the challenge. They like to cite the harsh conditions Fisher describes from the old days—rationed food and drinking water, sleeping on the floor for up to 37 consecutive days, being bitten by rats—and equate the challenging circumstances with the right reasons.

After all, they’ve taken on one of the toughest assignments there is. That’s heroic, isn’t it? But then they talk about the personal challenge that war represented. They wanted to test themselves. See how well they could do. Ego again. Those young kids, they don’t have nothin’ on us.

* * *

Fisher hopes to stay in Afghanistan until the last soldier leaves. According to the government’s current plan, this means he’ll be there until the end of 2011—more than nine years since he first began covering the war. He wants to keep doing what he does for as long as possible, but he’s getting older and is under no illusion he can continue forever. He wishes there were more journalists like Lang to whom he could pass the torch, but acknowledges that not everyone is up for it. “To soldiers, it’s their job,” he says, pausing for a moment before continuing. “We are there willingly.”

Willing, perhaps. But maybe not for the reasons he thinks. Journalists do things for myriad reasons—ones we’re proud of, and ones we’re not. Usually, they’re tied together in incomprehensible ways. Newsrooms aren’t set up with moral calculators or run by some divine law. Motivations mean little in newsrooms. Nobody is perfect, of course, least of all journalists.

As we near the end of our conversation, Fisher pauses. “What are your thoughts?” he asks, rather pointedly. “Is this the kind of work you’re interested in doing?” Silence. I hear nothing but the roar of the airfield. I don’t know how to answer his question. If I say yes, would it be for reasons he’d think were the wrong ones? My interests. My motivations. I wonder if he will judge me.

But then I realize I’m judging myself after all.

Not again; what a bother. But oh, it can’t wait. Music—that’ll do it. Aha! Dinah Shore: two minutes, 30 seconds and here comes the song. She’s ready, Dinah starts; and off she goes—Mil’s gone.

This always happens to Mildred MacDonald. Her 23-year-old bladder behaves with urgent, octogenarian unpredictability. That is, only when she’s on air. The familiar tingle creeps up her legs, just below her belly until she’s desperate for a “relieving” musical interlude. But again, only on air, between 11:15 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. on weekdays, when she’s hosting CHAB’s women’s show in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

The hem of her skirt—yes, never slacks—dances about her calves as she bursts out of Studio A. Her dark hair, in pretty waves, lifts off her shoulders as she makes her way through the sully plume of smoke and chatter. The boys—they light their cigs in the hallway. With their parted ’dos and sleeves rolled to the elbows, they watch MacDonald, sweet in her rush, and smile at her pace. The men in the control room share more than a smile, conspiring to lock the studio door. Oh my, wouldn’t that be a hoot! Mil, baby, you’d be stuck outside!

The facetious fellas are just talk, though, and MacDonald slips back in the nick of time. She’s skipped the bathroom gossip—that’s for the secretaries. MacDonald, after all, is the only CHAB girl with a mic. And she’ll be damned if she lets her skirt, or her bladder, get in her way.

And, boy, they sure didn’t. She reported for the women’s pages of Regina’s Leader-Post, then fixed her hat, curled her lashes and hosted women’s radio shows. At the mic for 50 years, she went on to work for 34 radio programs and five television shows at CBC in Ottawa. Basic Black, In Town and Out, Marketplace—hell, she did it all. A sweet thing-turned-venerable reporter, MacDonald was a trailblazer. Yes, she kicked her high-heeled shoe through the studio door long before women really lit up radio. So did Barbara Frum, Florence Bird and Jeanne Sauvé—the girls we all remember for noisily rattling cages and clearing the path for women in Canadian radio. MacDonald also broke ground. She just did it more quietly.

She went after the human interest stories, even as she began to cover social issues, all while unabashedly coordinating her hat and scarf. She started earlier and lasted longer than most other ladies of her time, modestly doing her job, and doing it well. And in that simple, quiet way, MacDonald made strides for women in Canadian broadcasting. But today, most of them haven’t a clue about her. When she died of pancreatic cancer in June 2009, her friends and colleagues celebrated her contribution to radio, but many in the industry didn’t even notice. As former colleague Susan Toccalino says, “Young people who come to CBC now don’t know who she was.”

* * *

MacDonald started in the industry before her curls could set. On the beat at 18, she got a job at the Swift Current Sun in 1945, reporting for the women’s pages. Then she blew it—she got hitched. Larry was a lanky guy; handsome, yes, but skinny as hell. A war veteran with unrelenting pain from shrapnel lodged in his leg, he took little Milly, then 19, to be his wife and she swapped her pen for a spatula. “It nearly fucking killed her,” says Alex MacDonald, the pair’s daughter, born two decades later. “She had nightmares about not getting the bathtub clean enough.”

So she tossed her apron at her mother-in-law and dropped the housewife bit. She got the gig at CHAB in 1951 and sweet-talked station manager Sid Boyling into giving Larry a job too. Larry, who was working at a meat-packing plant, had no experience in journalism. Don’t sweat it, MacDonald told Boyling, he’ll find his on-air voice. And he did. A few years later, they packed up and moved to Ottawa and, following a short stint atCFRA, landed at CBC. Larry fell for television; MacDonald stayed true to radio.

Her first big break came in 1954. Still the kid at CBC and just five weeks on the job, she was sent to pick up the Queen Mother in Virginia. Nervous as hell, but determined as ever, MacDonald boarded a Royal Canadian Air Force plane to begin her coverage. “I’ll tell my listeners all about it when I return,” she told Thom Benson, assistant director of CBC’s Outside Broadcasts. Ah, such naïveté. She would tell her listeners parts of it. Wrinkles and vogue—that would be MacDonald’s beat.

* * *

“We have seen her in a great many colours,” says the sweet voice. “Mostly her favourite, blue.” MacDonald’s cadence is meticulous. She delivers each word with the gentle precision of a parent reading a nighttime story. “But we seem to have seen that Her Majesty has changed from the very pale blue that she loved 15 years ago to the more, deeper tones of sapphire.”

* * *

That was journalism back then. The boys covered politics; the gals gave clothing reports. “They were the women’s pages of the air,” says Barbara Freeman, a Carleton University journalism professor whose specialties include gender and diversity in the media. These “women’s pages” spoke to the girls at home; the housewives who “yearned” for fashion news and child-rearing tips.

The kitchen shackles had come off in the 1940s because the men were fighting the war, and someone had to deliver the news. But when the soldiers returned, it was back to the pantry for most women. There were some, including Kate Aitken, whose on-air presence was not confined to wartime. Mrs. A, as everyone called her, gave CBC listeners candy-coated coverage of cooking and etiquette.

Then there were exceptions such as Betty Kennedy—perhaps best known as a panelist on Front Page Challenge—who joined Toronto’s CFRB in 1959. “I was unique in that I had complete autonomy,” says Kennedy, who later became a senator. “I treated my show like a news beat. The only instruction I ever got was, ‘Try not to get us sued.’”

MacDonald and many others trod somewhere in between, swallowing their temporary worker status. Married women weren’t full-time staff at CBC in those days. Surely hubby’s income would be more than enough. What’s a marriage for, after all?

Instead of stomping her feet, MacDonald tackled the inequity much more cunningly: through her reporting. As the ’50s turned into ’60s, she shed the clothing stories.

* * *

“I have no doubt in my mind that it was a case of racial discrimination,” John Shertulian tells MacDonald onAssignment in 1960. Shertulian and his wife believe an Ottawa landlord turned them away because of their West Indian heritage. “I had to have an income of at least $4,200. Secondly, I had to have no pets.” Not a peep from MacDonald; she lets him tell his story. “I had no pets. My income is over $4,200… Three or four days afterwards, I got a call from the agent telling me he could no longer rent me the house… I asked him why. He had no reason.”

Knowing tolerance for inequality is changing, she probes. “Mrs. Shertulian, maybe you can tell us about this: what sort of reaction have you had since this story was made public?”

“The phone rang nonstop,” chimes the contented voice. “Everybody was very, very sympathetic.”

* * *

Sympathy came with peace and love, at least outside the newsroom. The big changes would come to the studio the following decade, but heels were starting to graze the ground. Hell, there was even a woman or two delivering sports broadcasts on the radio! These ladies and their progress! Lucky for the old-fashioned fellas, most of the girls were still at home. But they wouldn’t be for long. Not with new space age inventions shaving hours off household to-do lists: the new disposable diaper from Pampers, wrinkle-free permanent-press fabrics and some sort of innovative self-cleaning oven (imagine that!).

And, of course, the pill, which made the cover of Time in 1967. Its social impact was enormous, giving women new control over their bodies, their careers and their lives. Power was hers, for a change. And fueled by books such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, more women started taking advantage of that power.

Also in 1967, Ottawa broadcaster Florence Bird chaired the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW). Despite over 20 years in journalism, she told the Ottawa Citizen in 1998 that she wanted to be remembered for her work for women. “In journalism,” she said, “my ideal was to write of important things. I wanted to improve things for women—and I believe I made a contribution.” Indeed, those contributions set in motion changes that would reinvent the role of the Canadian woman. There was still a lot of bunk to get through, of course, but MacDonald could keep the boys in line.

* * *

Early evening, 1968, and MacDonald waits in a dimly lit theatre for Duke Ellington. She’s covering his Ottawa concert for CBC Radio’s Bright Lights. After several futile calls to his agent (who had no idea what time he’d arrive) and speaking with several hotel operators (who had no idea who he was), MacDonald finally spots a shadowy figure on the stage. As his fingers test and tickle the piano’s keys, MacDonald moves down the centre aisle. The stage is lit just enough for her to distinguish the Duke’s face, and for him to look upon hers. With her full lips and prominent cheekbones, she is undeniably pretty.

“Did you say your name was Mildred?” Ellington asks. “This is what I think of when I hear the name Mildred.” And as he seduces a tender melody from the piano, MacDonald lets a smile break. It hides her reporter’s skepticism. “Oh, yeah,” she’ll later write in an article, “and at the next place, he asks, ‘Your name’s Donna? This is what I think of when I hear the name Donna.’”

After the serenade, she interviews him over steak sandwiches. The next morning, she receives an unexpected call. “I have a lot of radio and television interviews to do in Montreal today,” Ellington says, “and I can’t do them without you.” MacDonald politely declines, but it’s not the last she hears of him. Every Christmas, without fail, she receives one of his personally designed cards. She opens the last one six years later, shortly before he dies. “May all your life be merry,” it reads. “I love you, Duke Ellington.” 

* * *

Swooning interviewees were one thing, nonsense in the newsroom was another. One boss told the guys to cool it with the swearing. Not for her adorned ears, he said, until she told him to cut the crap. (MacDonald slipped four-letter words now and again. Especially to machines.) Women’s voices, too, were a topic of debate. “The early attitude was that a woman’s voice was not well-suited to radio,” says Donna Halper, media historian and author of Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. Technology was often the scapegoat—a lot of hooey, but it worked. Freeman adds: “Women were told that because of the sound technology of the time, their voices didn’t resonate as well as men’s voices. You could take that at face value, and some of them did, and they tried to pitch their voices lower.” That wasn’t exactly what MacDonald did, but the heads at CFRA did tell her to speak with a little more “breath.” So she learned how to sound—erm—sexy. Then she got to CBC and was told, “That’s not how women talk at the CBC.” So she learned to speak with authority. MacDonald certainly wasn’t compromising. She just wanted to tell her stories. And if that meant putting on a silly voice (or maybe dropping it), so be it.

 * * *

Darn, that won’t do—interview. Nope, not then either—editing. MacDonald is sitting in her gynecologist’s office, trying to schedule a baby. At 39, she never planned on getting pregnant. Bully to staying home and knitting booties, though. She’ll work until the first contraction. If that means following a story up the Peace Tower in Ottawa, lugging a reel-to-reel machine and carrying a baby nearing the eighth month of its incubation, so be it. She needs to capture Dominion Carillonneur Robert Donnell ringing the bells, and it has to sound authentic.

* * *

“She wouldn’t have done it from the ground,” says her daughter. “For the sound effects, you want to be up there.” And Alex knows what makes for good sound bites. From the time she was little, she trotted alongside MacDonald in-studio and on interviews. What about daycare or maternity leave, you ask? Ha! Show me a man on the moon and I’ll show you maternity leave. Well, MacDonald certainly wasn’t staying home. So Alex became a regular in CBC Radio’s joint on the seventh and eighth floors of the Château Laurier. “If you had a kid, you were definitely expected to leave,” says Freeman. But there were some women who said, “Okay, I’ve had my kid, I’m back, now do something with me.” Pregnant in the mid-’40s, radio reporter Marjorie McEnaney informed her bosses that she’d be back after three months. They scoffed, of course, and hired a man. Three months after giving birth, McEnaney simply showed up and started working. CBC eventually reinstated her, but just as a temporary worker, naturally.

The feminist movement shook up these policies and attitudes in the 1970s. Women chucked the sweetie-pie bit and demanded to be treated as equals. Bird produced a report for the RCSW on how the “equal” treatment of the sexes was faring in 1970. For those who thought all was well, she threw down pages of recommendations to make sure the girls got what they were worth. And the journalism girls caught on. An internal task force on the status of women at CBC led to the creation of an equity office in 1975. Pair that with labour legislation amendments, which meant equal rights for women in the civil service, and real changes were taking shape.

Attitudes were slower to come around. “You can have all the rules and regulations you want,” says Freeman. “You still have to work through the prejudices.” Jeanne Sauvé and others had already flipped the bird at those prejudices. Sauvé, who later became Governor General, defied the stereotypes, hosting Opinions on CBC in the ’50s and ’60s. The politically charged show was her baby—she picked the topics (including premarital sex), chose the guests, did the research, wrote the copy. In the ’70s, June Callwood, who combined journalism and social justice, confronted the contentious: child abuse, test-tube babies and, of course, feminism. And Bird, who was appointed to the Senate in 1978, continued to advocate for women’s rights. Though they shared a profession with MacDonald, they were a damn lot louder. Maybe that’s why we remember them.

* * *

By the ’80s, MacDonald’s always on the go (just look at the junk in her car), reeling in the stories and making a name for herself. No more fluff—today, she’s covering the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s annual meeting.

The voice is as sweet as 30 years ago, if plagued by a touch more vibrato from an overworked larynx: “Today’s family law is based on a social custom that goes back to the 13th century. This is where the man provides the necessities in exchange for the woman’s domestic and exclusive sexual service.” Very matter-of-fact. “Now, as long as the marriage works, women assume that property and money being acquired belongs to both of them. And it’s only when the marriage breaks up that the woman learns that the law doesn’t recognize that value of the work that she’s done in the home.”

Not a syllable overemphasized, not a point overstated. No preaching, just reporting. She doesn’t tell her listeners about how she learned to drive at age 50 after she and Larry separated. (Her father had said, “Nice girls didn’t,” so she’d never learned.) And she doesn’t tell her listeners about the constant anxiety of being a single mother and working freelance. No, she simply tells them about the conference. Other people’s stories interest her, not her own.

* * *

Every Saturday, MacDonald went to Wilfrid’s Restaurant in the Château Laurier to flip through the newspapers and maybe knock back a martini or two (three olives, very cold). From her corner booth near the window, she “interviewed” her waiters, learning their names, where they went to school and who they were dating. “In a very subtle way, she could get the information she needed or wanted out of someone,” says Rob Clipperton, who worked with MacDonald for nearly 20 years on Ottawa’s In Town and Out. “She could just make everybody totally relaxed.”

MacDonald conceded to retirement in 2001. It was those damn machines. She could never keep up; digital wasn’t for her. But that doesn’t mean she quit. No longer propped up by her mic, she leaned on her pen, writing for a couple of Ottawa newspapers, Forever Young and Capital Parent. She’d started out at theLeader-Post at a time when there were so few women that the newsroom had only a men’s bathroom. (Luckily, the staff at the Simpson’s department store a block away put up with her frequent trips to the ladies’ room.)

But she lived long enough to see Jennifer McGuire, a former radio producer, become head of CBC News. No more lone skirts, either. By 2008, women made up 45 percent of CBC/Radio-Canada’s corporate workforce. Chances are, most of them know how Bird’s protesting and Callwood’s activism helped them secure a spot. Little do they realize, MacDonald’s skill did too. “There are people who make the headlines and bring about the attention that can be a catalyst for change,” says former CBCer Abby Hagyard. “But I think the real change comes when people like Mildred just do the work. Just get it done.”

* * *

And MacDonald, known as the “woman with a smile in her voice,” has a few tricks up her pretty turquoise sleeve to help her get the work done. “This is Mil—aw, fuck.” She stops the tape. Funny, MacDonald only fumbles her words with extremely nervous interviewees. “Oh well, it’ll be edited anyway!” Her interview subject seems a little less on edge. 

“Shall we try again?”

The morning Question Period at Queen’s Park ends and reporters scrum politicians streaming into the halls. The exchanges aren’t rapid-fire shouting matches, there’s no staccato of camera flashes and politicians aren’t trying to outrun reporters chasing them down and barking questions. About two dozen journalists swarm Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, some holding television cameras that bathe him in a chilly white light. His mouth is the target of a dozen or so voice recorders, held by the tips of fingers as steadily as the journalists can as they try to get closer without toppling forward. Duncan answers their questions in a relatively calm rhythm. Several address the province’s massive projected $24.7-billion deficit. Does he know anything about the reports of General Motors paying back bailout money to U.S. and Canadian governments?

“Nothing formally, no. I just read that in The New York Times, and I take it for what it’s worth.”

How about that for a statement vague enough to be an adept deflection—  or a jab at every journalist in the scrum?

Deb Matthews is next, but the health minister enjoys a crowd half the size of Duncan’s. The rest of the reporters have left to speak with other Members of Provincial Parliament—a single journalist can’t be in two places at the same time, after all. Only half a dozen reporters and one camera greet New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath and as the numbers thin, the pace of the questioning slows down as well. Soon, all but the stragglers are gone.

At Queen’s Park, home of the Ontario legislature, scrums are now shorter, smaller and quieter. It’s a symptom of a dramatic drop in press gallery membership, as well as restrictions on the lines of communication between journalists and politicians, which make context and leads harder to come by. As multi-person bureaus become single-occupancy caverns, and experienced journalists with the know-how to navigate the intricacies of Canada’s second-largest government leave the hollowed halls, the breadth and depth of the coverage declines. Stories are now more narrowly focused on Toronto and only the biggest scandals and controversies get much attention, depriving citizens of the information they need to hold their representatives truly accountable.

* * *

When the new legislature building opened in 1893, the handful of reporters who regularly worked out of Queen’s Park often supplemented their salaries with odd jobs such as writing MPPs’ speeches. Until the 1960s, reporter-politician relationships were unabashedly close, and journalists often had to pick and choose what insider information they could disclose without risking that cozy coexistence. The love-in cooled as journalism became more adversarial, especially in the wake of Watergate. With the press taking its role as watchdog more seriously, coupled with swelling numbers of political support staff, the gallery grew in size as well.

The press gallery lounge used to be a storm of activity, according to past president Richard Brennan. Reporters crowded around the large table in the centre of the room, poring over the day’s papers, discussing the goings-on of the legislature. Today, the lounge is usually empty save one or two people shuffling through un-crinkled issues, or using the microwave in the corner to heat up their lunches.

An old boys’ club atmosphere persisted into the early 1990s and stories about reporters and politicians partying together after late-night sittings abound. Brennan notes that mickeys in jacket pockets and heavy drinking were common, but “papers don’t tolerate those shenanigans anymore.”

A bucket filled with bottles of beer sat in the lounge and—from early morning on—reporters, politicians and staff would drop in, crack open a cold one and shoot the breeze. The boys even played hockey together and would “sit around naked in the change room drinking beer afterward,” says Toronto Star columnist Jim Coyle. Since politicians and reporters talked with each other more, that meant more scoops, though not necessarily better coverage. Friends protect friends. “Before I came here,” says current gallery president  Randy Rath, “[Premier John] Robarts would have affairs left, right and centre and nobody would say a word about it.”

Today, a glance at the membership list reveals a large number of “vacant” entries beside bureau phone numbers. Full-time reporters, researchers, columnists and camera crews have also disappeared from the legislature building, which some affectionately call the Pink Palace for its sandstone exterior. In 2001, the gallery had 88 full- and part-time members. It now has 45.

CTV Ontario’s team included four reporters and four full-time camera operators in the ’90s. Today, only Paul Bliss remains, aided by a cameraman until 2 p.m. CBC Television is now gone, leaving only CBC Radio’s Mike Crawley to regularly represent the crown corporation. When TVO replaced its provincial affairs programStudio 2 with The Agenda with Steve Paikin in 2006, the Queen’s Park segment “4th Reading” went with it. TVO’s final departure from the Park in 2008 raised eyebrows, though Paikin, a former Queen’s Park correspondent and the author of a book on Robarts, still offers insightful comments about provincial politics on his robust blog.

Many newspapers, including The Windsor Star, the London Free Press and The Hamilton Spectator have also left. Today, one reporter from the Ottawa Citizen and another Canwest reporter, filing for the National Post and the rest of the chain, are the only ones left. “You’ve got fewer people chasing a diversity of stories,” says former Globe and Mail correspondent Richard Mackie. “They have less and less time to go after stories that might interest them and they have to spend more time on the stories that everybody else is writing. It’s frustrating when you hear about something but you can’t write about it.”

Some prominent veterans recently vacated their desks as well. CBC Radio’s John McGrath took a retirement package in July 2009. An 11-year veteran of Queen’s Park, he got his first taste of provincial coverage in 1995 following Mike Harris, who led the Progressive Conservatives from third-party status to power. “It was the biggest change in Ontario politics, and I was on the bus.” McGrath says CBC waffles on coverage of Queen’s Park. “There are times it thinks it’s important, and times it doesn’t give a damn.”

The Globe once enjoyed a bureau of three reporters, one columnist and one researcher. In March 2009, management shuffled columnist Murray Campbell out of Queen’s Park. He resigned and is now the communications director at the Ontario Power Authority. Hearing rumours that the Globe wouldn’t replace Campbell, the party leaders told publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley the move was a mistake. “They all recognized that he had a very long institutional memory of the place,” says Graham Murray, president of G.P. Murray Research Ltd., which releases the subscriber-only newsletter Inside Queen’s Park every two weeks. “He wrote very well, had a good sense of the place, a good political gut and he, in various ways, had a lot to bring to the process. Also a charming fellow.”

Past and present correspondents speculate that the Campbell controversy was one reason behind the end of Edward Greenspon’s days as the paper’s editor-in-chief. And whether or not the Globe was bowing to pressure from the politicians or from readers, Adam Radwanski took over the column in September, which he supplements with a blog on theglobeandmail.com. He and reporter Karen Howlett are now the only full-time members of the Globe’s bureau.

Even the politicians seem worried enough by the changes to voice their concerns in public. “What government relies on at the end of the day is an informed and caring citizenry. And that depends on you folks doing your jobs well and having the resources you need to do that job well,” commented Premier Dalton McGuinty at a press conference the month Campbell left. “But, mostly, I’ve seen a lot of you go. That has not been a healthy development.”

* * *

Beyond the most-frequented halls and visitor-friendly sections of Queen’s Park, the venerable building can be a maddening asymmetrical maze. A stairwell may lead to several press gallery offices or into the stern gaze of a gentleman in a security uniform politely asking visitors to turn right around and go back the way they came. Lacquered wooden door frames, reaching from floor to ceiling, and beige walls evoke a sense of foreboding. If Queen’s Park was a source, it would radiate a don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you vibe.

Rath, also a correspondent for Hamilton’s CHCH-TV, speeds through the twisting halls and half-mazes as he goes about his daily business. His office, which he shares with Global’s Sean Mallen, is a mess of papers, press releases and television equipment. His desk is particularly cluttered, accented by a Barack Obama bobble-head, and a medical face mask hanging from a shaded lamp. A tacky navy blue corduroy recliner sits beside it. Mallen’s desk is similarly cluttered, but surrounded instead by calendars and Ontario party rosters with scribbled notes on MPP mug shots. The two are an odd couple: Rath is tall, clad in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans and greets people with, “Hey, how ya doing?” The shorter Mallen—who, along with contributing stories to Global’s evening news, single-handedly produces segments for his weekly show Focus Ontario—is well-dressed in a clean suit, has nary a hair out of place and has voice intonations that are simultaneously friendly and eerily made-for-TV.

As the gallery thins, the number of potential stories isn’t slowing, and journalists left behind, including veterans such as Rath and Mallen, struggle to keep up, often chasing only the biggest story or two each day. The amount of information available online or through Freedom of Information requests has grown, but reporters are frequently too busy to use it. And if they can’t do the research, their readers and viewers will never know what’s going on beneath the surface. “The news media have a very important role in a democracy,” says Rath. “If they’re not shining a light on what’s happening, then nobody can.”

The 29-year veteran cites the eHealth Ontario scandal as an example of the kind of story the press gallery needs to bring to light. The investigation of misspending and untendered contracts at the agency created to develop a provincial health record database began with Freedom of Information requests filed by the Tories. The revelations led reporters, notably Bliss and the Star’s Tanya Talaga, to start digging. Talaga’s first investigative story, headlined, “Health agency paid consultant $2,750 a day, documents show,” ran May 29, 2009 on page A6. The ensuing flurry of reporting culminated in an Auditor General’s special report that documented significant waste in the $1 billion spent by the agency since 2002. The scandal dominated headlines for months and led to the resignations of Health Minister David Caplan and eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer.

For his reporting, Bliss relied on sources he’d cultivated as well as leaked documents, but with no colleagues in his bureau, he also had to provide daily coverage of the legislature. “It’s tough because sometimes there will be three or four stories here, and I have to focus on one, but still maybe write two or three,” he says, giving credit to his bosses, who let him spend months on eHealth. “The station let me dig. I’m happy they backed me on that.”

Bliss has worked mostly full-time at Queen’s Park for seven years. But Graham White, who was a procedural advisor in the Clerk’s Office at the legislature from 1978 to 1984, worries about the high turnover in the press gallery. Now a political science professor at the University of Toronto, he points out that many reporters consider a Queen’s Park assignment a stepping stone towards their real goal: covering Parliament Hill.

* * *

As bureaus diminished in size and eventually left Queen’s Park, so did the journalists who staffed them. Many of these reporters worked for news outlets outside Toronto. Now, for example, the Spectator, like all Torstar papers, runs copy from the Star’s bureau. Even Coyle, whose column often appears in other papers, sees a problem with this. “I don’t mind saying it: I don’t have a Hamilton perspective. I’m an east Toronto guy, working for a Toronto paper, and that’s what I write about. The interests of Hamilton are not at the top of my mind most days when I’m writing. I don’t think the papers are terrifically served.”

Not all of his colleagues see this as a recent or crippling situation. “It’s always been a bit Toronto-centric, I think, just because there are so many reporters here from Toronto,” says Sun Media bureau chief Antonella Artuso, who points out that people who cover Queen’s Park from the gallery need to live in or near Toronto anyway. Sun Media papers will often take copy from her and add local sources or details, but articles exclusively written by staff from the London Free Press, for example, are few and far between. And many of the stories coming out of the legislature have equal importance anywhere in Ontario. “Are there stories that, if I were working for the Spectator, I would write?” says Star correspondent Robert Benzie. “Perhaps, but I would argue that stories about all-day kindergarten are just as applicable in Waterloo or Windsor as they are in Toronto, regardless of who’s quoted in them.”

Jim Poling, managing editor at the Spectator and a former Queen’s Park reporter, doesn’t believe a full-time office is essential for quality coverage. In September 2009, one of his reporters, Steve Buist, compiled a four-part report on the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, featuring people whose lives fell apart because of addiction to the slots. And in 2008 and 2009, thepaper produced dozens of articles covering a C. difficile outbreak, a few of which appeared in the Star. Meanwhile, Maria Babbage’s Canadian Press piece about the sit-in against the harmonized sales tax staged by two Tory MPPs, for example, would have been no less critical or entertaining a read whether it appeared in the Spec or on Yahoo! Canada News: “For all its bluster and bathroom humour, the political circus over tax harmonization that dominated the Ontario legislature for 44 hours ended Wednesday with a whimper, rather than the populist-fuelled bang of a legislative desk.”

But other members are convinced that a full-time presence is better than occasional visits. According to Mallen, a reporter making a one-off visit to the legislature doesn’t know the long-term context of most current events. The ensuing story might be weaker than if a correspondent had been following it for a week, catching comments that had already been refuted or over-quoted days earlier. Adds Bliss: “If you’re on the phone you’ve got to be polite; you can’t interrupt. It’s a lot less of a conversation. You gather a lot from body language or voice intonation. The physical discomfort of being in a scrum can sometimes loosen the lips of a politician.”

* * *

The late-night drinking culture and the beer bucket in the lounge are history. Even night sittings are, for the most part, a thing of the past, to better accommodate a family-friendly workforce. “I want to pick up my kids at daycare, I don’t want to sit around drinking beer with the minister of widgets,” says Benzie. “Frankly, I’m not sure you got better coverage from that sort of clubbiness.”

At the same time, the government controls its message more carefully than ever. The premier leads almost all press conferences instead of sharing the spotlight with his ministers. And since Question Period moved from the afternoon to 10:30 a.m., reporters have less time to prepare questions for scrums. Before, they had a few luxurious hours to research and gather details to better grill their targets.

While the government may benefit from less scrutiny, the smaller press gallery creates problems for the opposition parties. Gilles Bisson, NDP representative for the northern riding of Timmins-James Bay, says, “Back in 1990, you could push an idea and get someone to write about it.” With fewer members—about half of the crowd he remembers when he was a part of Bob Rae’s government—“it’s hard to get them to write about anything other than ‘the big story.’”

When smaller, local stories do make the news, a single article doesn’t have the same resonance with readers as long-running scandal investigations. “Critical media are essential to democracy, and we have less and less of it than 20 years ago when I was elected.” Bisson compensates by appearing on local radio talk shows or dropping in on the newsrooms in his riding for informal chats. He doesn’t worry about getting quoted in Toronto papers: “Nobody would read them at home.”

While Bisson may have found his own way around the problem, Graham White believes the reduced coverage of smaller and local issues undermines the democratic role of journalistic watchdogs. “If people really don’t know what’s going on other than in very broad-brushstroke kinds of ways, it’s very difficult to keep government accountable.”

* * *

In early December 2009, Progressive Conservative MPPs Bill Murdoch, in a kilt, and Randy Hillier, his bespectacled wingman, end their two-day camping trip inside the legislature. That Monday, during Murdoch’s statement on the harmonized sales tax, he called McGuinty a liar, the equivalent of walking into Question Period with a sandwich board that reads, “Hey, jerks, suspend me.” It’s a perfect storm of looming taxation, partisan skulduggery and the media’s itch for salacious drama combining to create a Queen’s Park story with more fervour to it than usual.

A scrum gathers around the visibly fatigued MPPs, who declare victory over…something. Coyle’s column that morning spared no words for the stunt: “It’s no great victory for [Opposition leader Tim] Hudak that his PC party now wears the flushed and foolish faces of Bill Murdoch and Randy Hillier. They were faces of raving irrationality that any woman abused by her mate would recognize.” The online version of the article attracted 43 comments, more than any other Coyle column that month.

The scrum is a little larger today and the main event comes as Murdoch and Hillier call Coyle out for the column.

“How can you stand here and say the things you’re saying when you’ve been complicit in the same kind of thing?” asks Coyle.

“Because we have democracy,” replies Murdoch. “And how can you write the crap you write? Because we have democracy, that’s why.”

How’s that for a double-edged swipe from an elected representative?

Hillier delivers the second jab. “I wouldn’t even talk to you,” he says, then harps about “gutter journalism.”

They certainly don’t sound like old boys who’ll gather in the press gallery lounge to chat over beer any time soon. Though the sit-in ends uproariously, the Star’s website keeps the story of embattled golfer Tiger Woods at the top of its front page for most of the day. Readers apparently prefer gossip about a celebrity’s clandestine girlfriends to news of what goes on in the province’s central nervous system. The machinations in the Pink Palace can be just as lively, and sometimes just as scandalous—but they can’t cut through the din of pop idols. And informing citizens won’t be any easier if the press gallery continues to shrivel.

Michael Cooke stomps around the newsroom, asking anyone who will listen, “Are we pictured up?” TheToronto Star’s editor-in-chief will hold a front-page story if it has no art. He’ll barge around spouting his catchphrase, his doggedness bordering on absurdity. In April 2008, police charged Christine Bedford with assault after she threw coffee in a man’s face on a commuter train. A year later she pleads guilty and Cooke wants to play it big. Obsessed with finding the woman, he wants her photo, and he wants it now. Her story will represent the angry face of the recession in Toronto. Perfect.

So begins the summer of the photo desk’s discontent—the photographers have only a vague idea of what Bedford looks like, which will make picking her out of the downtown crowds nearly impossible. “Every day someone was assigned to the Coffee Lady,” says a veteran photographer. “It became a mission. But I don’t think you’ll find a photographer who would understand why we were still chasing Coffee Lady.” And the chase continues for weeks. Each day, a photojournalist and Dale Anne Freed (the only reporter who’d seen a police photo of Bedford) stake out her high-rise condo downtown. The story runs June 2, 2009 on A1 without Coffee Lady’s photo. But Cooke still wants that picture. So the stakeouts continue. At nearly every morning news meeting in June, Cooke asks, “Are we pictured up?” until someone finally nails Coffee Lady. But the shot never appears in the paper—the story is long forgotten. “For me,” one Star insider says, “the biggest question was really: What the fuck has Honderich done?”

Cooke is an unusual choice to lead the proudly liberal Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper. Conrad Black says the 57-year-old Brit’s a jaded, second-tier tabloid editor, whose conservative political views are at odds with the Star’s social justice slant. (Ironic, since Hollinger employed him for much of his career.) TheNew York Post mocked him for his alleged women’s shoe fetish and nicknamed him the Cookie Monster (which prompted Gawker to paste his head on the Muppet character’s body). Driven by unbridled ambition and a fierce competitive streak honed through nearly 30 years of rugby, Cooke has spent the bulk of his career running major tabloid dailies such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News and Vancouver’s The Province. He packed them with short investigative features, splashy display and human-interest fare—and watched readership numbers rise. Now, he’s brought his tabloid journalism instinct to his own broadsheet.

In fall 2008, after the failures of back-to-back editorial regimes in the previous four years, chair of Torstar’s voting trust (and former longtime Star editor and publisher) John Honderich decided it was time to restore stability to his beloved newspaper. “We’ve been joking in the newsroom for a couple of years, the only constant is change,” says city editor Graham Parley. Honderich first tapped publisher John Cruickshank, who then convinced the most influential person at Torstar (the Star’s parent company) that Cooke, his longtime partner at the Sun-Times, was the one to reinvigorate the venerable institution.

Cooke expects to fight—and win—the protracted Toronto newspaper war for a slice of the shrinking circulation pie in the age of internet ascendance. When he arrived on March 2, 2009, staff were understandably skeptical about him. A polarizing presence in other newsrooms, he was aggressive, blunt and played hard, but also brought contagious energy. The Star became an exciting place to work again. Showing off his feistiness and flair for eye-catching presentation, he devoted half-pages to single photographs. Traditionally quirky Toronto stories got even quirkier, less local and arguably less relevant. But an expansion of the investigative unit paid off, with the paper regularly embarrassing governments into action. And then, on November 3, 2009, morale plummeted. Management announced that to save an estimated $4 million per year, the Star intended to shed nearly a third of the newsroom by eliminating some or all of its copy desk and outsourcing editing. The Star’s readership was on the upswing before the new team arrived: numbers perked up 2.6 percent in NADbank’s interim 2008-2009 report, not easily achieved in today’s newspaper market. It’s too soon to tell whether Cooke’s formula of mixing crusading journalism with lighter stories will keep readers hooked.

His friends and colleagues say he lives for a challenge but, really, he lives to win. Still, strife in the editorial department may make that difficult. After years of infighting and lagging in the race for online innovation, his hiring was a coup for a paper traditionally restricted by hierarchy and ego. Cooke is a showboating editor accustomed to attracting attention to himself and his newspapers, and the Star might well be his last championship run—provided his team stays standing behind him.

***

Cooke grew up in Lancashire County’s Nether Kellet, a northern English village (population: 646) and developed skin tough as steel. “Whenever we get to cross paths,” says longtime friend and newspaperman Garry Steckles, “we don’t spend our time reminiscing about playing in grim back lanes or having to use outside netties [toilets] in the middle of winter.” Born to a sailor and quarryman father and housekeeper mother, Cooke’s formal education came to an abrupt halt at 16. After failing his O-level exams, he was asked not to return to grammar school. He then worked for a month without pay at the Morecambe Visitor, a small weekly, until the paper hired him. But, ever the boundary pusher, his insolence later got him fired. He went on to Bristol’s Western Daily Press for five weeks before escaping in the middle of the night because he was afraid to give his resignation to the paper’s fearsome editor. He worked casually on Fleet Street for the Daily Mail, The Sun and Sunday Express. On a London street in 1972, a young, barefoot, redheaded art student in an ankle-length fur coat glanced his way. He’d later write that he saw the faces of his three unborn children in his future wife’s eyes that day. Even later, he would write about her in the Sun-Times, recalling a rainy “wet night” they spent together when he was 19 and Barbara was “all tossed red hair and pout.” During a vacation to Toronto in 1974, the young editor visited the Star on the recommendation of Bob Hely, a colleague at The Sun in London. The visit turned into a few trial shifts on the copy desk, which turned into a job. Three years later, Cooke left Toronto for Montreal to become assistant city editor of The Gazette.

***

He grinds his cleats into the slick grass, shoes squelch in the mud. It’s the October 1984 championship game, and Cooke is hooking for the Town of Mount Royal, Quebec. He licks his lips, wipes rain from his dark eyes. The first law of rugby is go forward. Head down, plow through. Run. Glance back only when you’re far enough ahead you can’t lose. Cooke scowls, his chubby, pugilistic body holding firm, bare legs streaked with dirt. There’s an up-and-under coming his way. Where the hell is the fullback? This is the second time.Cooke’s blue-and-yellow striped form shuffles backward to match the faint arc traced by the ball flying through the air. The second law of rugby is support.

Spectators mock him from the line. Glancing at the four grimacing opponents charging toward him, Cooke stiffens and raises his eyes to meet the lingering punt with his name on it. It’s a sucker punch of the worst order: the promise of a rib-rattling tackle if he can make the catch. And if he can’t? The other team might score, and that’s a fate worse than death. He’s not the biggest, or the fastest, or the best. But he has guts. And losing’s not an option. He staggers. Knocked backwards, ribs cracking, stomach in his mouth for a split second. He chokes, catches his breath, spit and iron sticking to the walls of his throat, gasping with laughter before he’s crunched to the ground, ball at his chest. Broken rib? Nah. But it’ll bruise tomorrow. He leaves the field a happy warrior. A winner. Cooke’s own photo appears on the front page of The Gazette’s sports section where he later writes about the game.

***

In January 1988, Cooke sauntered into a Concordia University classroom, banged his black briefcase down and rolled up his sleeves. The 25 students in his copy editing class watched him pull out a copy of USAToday. “I love this newspaper,” he said. “It’s an editor-driven paper. A paper conceived and imagined by editors. Very clear. Very high concept.” One month later, Cooke launched the Sunday Gazette, designed to be a light weekend read full of quirky features and first-person journalism. He shaped his team after the British model, running the Sunday paper as its own entity equipped with a roster of writers and editors chosen by—and reporting directly to—him. It succeeded in stamping out the competing Montreal Daily News, but newsroom critics dismissed it as too irreverent. “The Sunday paper was designed to block a tabloid so it was designed to be a tabloid,” says Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells, who was then one of Cooke’s favoured feature writers. “Young serious reporters would clip out stories they didn’t like and bring them to weekly development sessions. I heard a lot more criticism during the time Michael and I overlapped at the paper than ‘Thank God we’ve got Michael Cooke.’”

In 1992, the Edmonton Journal recruited Cooke as managing editor. He stayed three years before becoming editor-in-chief of The Province in Vancouver. Beginning in 1997, Cooke also commuted to Hamilton as part of the team selected by Conrad Black to launch the National Post. After several years of bitter sparring with The Province’s union over his divide-and-conquer leadership, Cooke was frustrated—and not beloved in the newsroom. (“He was trying to be some kind of Pied Piper,” says deputy news editor Janet Ingram-Johnson. “Those who were not his acolytes would be discarded and treated quite poorly. He was very vindictive if you posed any threat to his management style.”) That’s when Hollinger executive David Radler offered him the job of a lifetime: editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times. Vancouver Sun editor John Cruickshank would be his co-editor (and eventually his publisher). The Province newsroom cheered at the announcement, but Radler was confident. “Since we put a duo in Chicago and we had the dull Cruickshank,” he says, “we had to have a more exciting presence. Cooke brings a flair to any job that most editors in this country don’t have.”

A half-decade later, his career took another leap forward. He left the Sun-Times in 2005 to become editor of the New York Daily News, one of the most-read newspapers in the United States. “What he accomplished at the Sun-Times and the Daily News is extremely rare,” Wells says. “Someone from a Canadian newsroom making it to that level—it confirms the faith some of us had in him.” But it was apparent upon Cooke’s arrival that he wouldn’t really be running the Daily News. He fought with editorial director Martin Dunn and constantly placated billionaire owner Mort Zuckerman. “From the minute he walked in the building,” says Caitlin Kelly, a former Daily News reporter, “it was never clear to anybody who exactly ran the paper.” As before, Cooke tried to surround himself with people he trusted. He offered Globe columnist Christie Blatchford a job. He gave former Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg a column—written from Chicago. (“Why do you have a Chicago columnist in a New York newspaper?” one observer close to Cooke asks. “It was seen as a real slap in the face.”) The newsroom revolted, and Steinberg was fired.

Undaunted, Cooke courted publicity by approving, and starring in, a documentary series about the Daily News for Bravo called Tabloid Wars. He met all the right people—Harry Evans, Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington—and went to all the right parties. But his heavyweight pals couldn’t assuage the barrage of gossipy New York Post headlines about him. The Post accused Cooke of reprinting nearly identical stories he’d written in past papers (which he did) and taking an expensive trip to England from a public relations representative who he wrote was a friend. And, after coming across a column written by Sun-Times columnist (and Cruickshank’s wife) Jennifer Hunter calling out her “former editor” for his women’s footwear fetish, thePost ran with it. (Hunter declined comment for this story.) “That’s absolutely business as usual, for the Post to be pissy just because they can,” Kelly says. “But Cooke was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s open season,’ because he had made some missteps and had some real enemies.” At Cruickshank’s request, Cooke headed back to theSun-Times at the beginning of 2006, as senior vice-president of editorial, to oversee the company’s 100-plus titles. Post editor Col Allan sent him a pair of red women’s boots as a parting gift.

Cooke’s not camera-shy, nor is he shy about playing favourites—star players shouldn’t sit on the bench, after all. For years, he’s fostered the careers of exceptional journalists, nurturing their professional growth. Back at the Sun-Times, he convinced “fraidy-cat” front-page editor James Smith to appear on Oprah to discuss the tabloid’s much-lauded Barack Obama covers after the U.S. presidential election in 2008. “He e-mailed me and told me, ‘This is what we’re doing,’” says Smith of his leap from small-town designer to front-page editor at the Sun-Times. “When he tells you you’re doing something, you really don’t feel like you have a choice. You know he’ll back you up.” Cooke’s talented new hire became one of the chosen few saved during a massive round of last-hired, first-fired layoffs—a decision that infuriated the newsroom. Wells says his former boss’s penchant for picking superstars was controversial at The Gazette. “He always played favourites,” Wells says. “If you were one of them, it was a wonderful place to be.” And if you weren’t? “There’s no time to flatter people who can’t help you put out a paper. He doesn’t like hand-holding.”

***

Meanwhile, the past five years have not been kind to Torstar. Revenues from the company are a prime income flow for the five families—including the Honderiches—that make up its voting trust. But the company’s fortunes now mirror the newspaper industry’s decline. As dividends eroded, tension between the families heightened. The younger generations no longer stood united behind the unwritten rule: the Atkinson Principles trump the bottom line. These six governing editorial tenets are modelled after influential editor Joseph E. Atkinson’s advocacy for social justice, the rights of working people and a strong, united Canada. “It’s not Mao and his Little Red Book,” says managing editor Joe Hall. “We don’t go around chanting. It’s almost instinctive—you know what’s wrong.” Critics say the principles are noble in theory but fungible in practice, conveniently bending to be everything to everyone. When Torstar is making money, they are easier to embrace. But in 2006, a Merrill Lynch report bluntly expressed the glaring conflict between the profit motive and the Atkinson Principles: “The content of the newspaper is constrained to report in a manner that reflects the Principles, and this puts a potential cap on the audience size.”

Torstar makes much of its profit from publishing Harlequin romance novels. (Will a plot line of the dashing Fleet Street reporter sweeping a barefoot, fur-clad lass off her feet soon appear?) The bodice-rippers steadily pick up the slack for the company’s media holdings: a 19-percent stake in British Columbia’s Black Press, a 20-percent stake in ctvglobemedia, the Metroland empire of community newspapers in southern Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe and of course, the Star. Without Harlequin and Metroland, the flagship wouldn’t have nearly the same resources at its disposal. Torstar’s profits have decreased substantially in the last five years. It reported a net loss of $180.5 million in 2008, due in part to an investment in ctvglobemedia. That’s down from a $101-million net profit the year before, and even that’s far from its $124-million profit in 2003.

***

David Olive sits in a circle with about 20 colleagues. It’s spring 2007 and Toni Antonellis, a consultant from Atlanta-based TSA & Company, is leading a training session in a room adjoining the Star newsroom. She says they’re going to play a game that will help them work better as a team. “It was as though it was a preschool class,” says Olive, a business columnist. “For God’s sake, this is three hours out of my day.” The consultants crawl all over the newsroom. “Whenever the consultants come,” he says, “it means management doesn’t know what the heck they’re doing.” Fred Kuntz was the editor at the time. When then-publisher Jagoda Pike appointed him in 2006, staff welcomed the change. The previous administration of publisher Michael Goldbloom and editor-in-chief Giles Gherson had lasted just two years. In contrast to Gherson’s outside experience as Report on Business editor at the Globe and editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal, Kuntz was the ultimate insider, with more than 20 years experience at the Star and Torstar’s regional papers. Although the newsroom celebrated then, within a year, confidence drained. “Fred was just so tightly wound and the whole newsroom was tightly wound and people were scared,” says Kevin Donovan, a 25-year veteran who leads the investigative team. During Kuntz’s second year—the year of consultants, confusion and budget cuts—a much-publicized disagreement between then-ceo Rob Prichard and Honderich led to divisions on the Torstar board. Because Prichard had installed Pike as publisher, and Pike had installed Kuntz as editor-in-chief, there was fealty in the hierarchy. Senior editors were told not to speak to Honderich. If someone went to dinner with him, for example, staff would snitch to upper management. Then the axe fell on Pike and Kuntz, and then Prichard, who received a controversial $9.6-million severance package.

The paper desperately needed stability after five years of rotating-door management and declining revenues. “There had been blood on the floor right up to the publisher and chairman’s office,” says Rosie DiManno, columnist and 27-year veteran. “We just wanted somebody to come back to us who knew newspapers.” The glorious appointment of Honderich—the Star’s “captain, my captain”—as chair of the board, which officially took effect May 6, 2009 but in practice happened months earlier, re-established an energy that had faltered after the arrival of the consultants. In late fall 2008, Honderich phoned John Cruickshank, who’d been at his specially created publisher position at CBC News for just over a year. It took little coaxing to get Cruickshank interested in moving. Hindered by bureaucracy, things were moving too slowly for him at CBC.

Cooke, still at the Sun-Times, moved to the top of a short list of potential editors. “This was certainly John Cruickshank’s preferred choice,” Honderich says. After dinner at a Florida crab shack, Cooke and Honderich left with an understanding. “I came out of the conversation a complete believer that he was the one,” he continues. “He was going to bring life, fun, humour, the traditional great old-fashioned investigative reporting—a newspaper that was going to make a difference and have fun doing it.” Finally, staff would have an editor who used the newsroom bathroom along with the closer executive one—an editor who would crusade for the working people, just like the Star.

***

Cooke rips his glasses off and tosses them carelessly on the table in front of him. He fidgets in spurts: tapping, gesturing frenetically, his eyes darting from kitchen to ceiling to floor, running his fingers through his hair. He’s distracted. He sits at a table near the front door of the Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar, an upscale restaurant in downtown Toronto. He’s slanted forward, leaning in, listening intently. He sips his glass of red wine. He’s forgone his usual rum and coke for something a little more refined tonight. It’s March 1, 2009, and Cooke’s dinner companion is Mary Vallis, a National Post reporter for whom Cooke has been a professional mentor. He’s new again to the city he left more than three decades earlier. And tomorrow is his first day as the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star. He’s not talking about tomorrow. Trying not to admit he is nervous, trying not to admit that he cares—a contrast to his call-it-like-it-is instincts. He stands, asks: “Vallis, what shirt should I wear tomorrow?” “Pink,” she responds. He thanks her. She wishes him luck as he walks out of the restaurant.

***

Cooke stands in the newsroom before nearly 100 people. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. (It’s not pink.) He’s talking war. “Look,” he says, “there’s nothing wrong with these newspapers you keep hearing about. It’s all the debt that was taken on by the clowns who bought these newspapers. And we are going to win. If there are going to be deaths among papers in Toronto, we are going to be the last paper standing.” Then he goes looking for recruits. He lands Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Watson, who’d left the Los Angeles Times, to start an Arctic bureau—a “romantic” notion for the local paper that left some staff scratching their heads. He woos back high-profile columnist Jennifer Wells, who’d left the Star for the Globe a year and a half earlier. He picks Gazette editor Andrew Phillips to lend his business section credibility. He refuses to let freelance reporter Sonia Verma go to the Globe without a bidding war. And he hires his good friend, former boss and running buddy, Murdoch Davis, to become his executive editor responsible for exploring outsourcing options and coping with the aftermath. To hire Davis, perhaps best known for writing Canwest’s notorious national editorials, Cooke had to make a personal visit to Honderich, who’d spoken out publicly against the editorials. Honderich had such reservations about Davis becoming a Star man that he insisted on interviewing him personally. Cooke, with the full blessings of Honderich and Cruickshank, had settled into a new rhythm, and despite some reservations about razzle-dazzle and “picturing it up,” he brought a renewed sense of stability to the place. “Prichard, Pike and Kuntz alienated Honderich from the newsroom and they paid with their scalps,” says Dan Smith, book editor and longtime union steward. “Clearly he’s made a decision, for better or for worse: It’s Cruickshank’s newspaper and Cooke’s newsroom.”

***

Cruickshank is the Star’s steady guiding hand who wears the mantle of long-term visionary. A philosophy and politics junkie in Harry Potter–style glasses, he is soft-spoken and pauses pensively before speaking. He first met Cooke in the Gazette newsroom in 1979. Both men were married without kids, exploring the city on double dates with their young wives. Later, as the pair weathered the dot-com bust and Hollinger’s collapse during their eight years in Chicago, they spent their lunch hours walloping the shit out of each other. “There was absolutely no money—we were cutting staff and having issues with Radler—so we played highly competitive Ping-Pong. We probably both threw racquets at various points.” The pair parted ways briefly in 2008, when Cruickshank left to become publisher of CBC News. “Michael and I have had a professional relationship that has been as deep as any friendship,” Cruickshank says. “If a friend is someone you trust with your life and have great faith in, then Michael and I are truly friends.”

In contrast to his publisher, Cooke is the million-ideas-a-day “squirrel on coffee.” He’s the brash but charming Englishman who never tires (provided he’s had eight hours of sleep). Doesn’t leave work before
poring over the front page. Knows what readers want. Makes instinctive decisions. Hooked on BlackBerry. “The attention span of a fruit fly” (Smith). The “master networker” (Davis). “The most fun person I’ve ever met” (Blatchford). A Cooke party anecdote: “Ever tell you about that time Obama saw me naked at the East Bank Club gym? He was in a towel…” (A White House spokesperson could not confirm.)

Cooke has endeared himself to readers—and opened himself up to scrutiny—in part by writing deeply personal travel pieces and columns. One was about his best-man speech at his brother Frank’s wedding; he called the bride by Frank’s ex-girlfriend’s name (the marriage didn’t last). Another was about being tricked into pressing sheep’s testicles to his ear at 11 years old. A third was about a family video diary he, his wife and his three children kept in the 1980s. Cruickshank is certain: “Michael has an innate ability to connect with newspaper readers.”

***

Standing in the third-floor auditorium at One Yonge Street, Cruickshank is hosting a town hall meeting in July 2009. As his PowerPoint slides flick by, the publisher announces options the board is considering for the Star. The first involves keeping the paper more or less the same, with a smaller team producing content for both the paper and the web, provided advertising revenue goes up. The second explores the idea of producing niche publications in much smaller numbers and with content selected based on demographics such as teenagers or women. The third option: phasing out the paper entirely. He flips to a slide reading: “Death of print: 2020.” “I think Cruickshank thought, ‘Why aren’t they hearing me?’” Smith says, adding that the publisher never definitively said the paper’s last print edition would be published in 2020. Nevertheless, the newsroom woke up that day—the journalists were outraged.

***

On November 3, 2009 Star management announces its plan to outsource copy editing and offer a voluntary severance program to employees. That night, Cooke heads to the Air Canada Centre for a hockey game. He’s invited 15 employees, all managers but one, to the Torstar corporate box. It looks bad, and he knows it, but he can’t cancel the fun. How would that look to the other two guests he’s invited—directors of Pagemasters North America, the editing firm the Star might hire? He planned this weeks ago. He didn’t choose when the announcement was coming. He wants his managers to meet them in a social setting, give them time to ask questions. The following week, Cooke stands with Davis—whom staff have taken to calling “the man with the axe”—in the Star cafeteria. He reads from a prepared script about how outsourcing copy editing can work.  Smith, the union veteran, calls out: “If you’re actually serious about waiting for the union alternative, why did you go out drinking with Pagemasters on the night you announced it?” Cooke runs across the room at him. The two men square off, nose to nose, both just shy of five-foot-eight. “Oh yes, that’s right,” Cooke barks sarcastically. “We picked the worst possible thing we could come up with to show our contempt for you and everybody that works here.” Three weeks later, Cruickshank publicly announces the plan to use Pagemasters to replace nearly 80 editorial employees. Staff show up to work wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with “dead editor walking.” But in early January, management and the union reach an agreement to save most of those jobs. The Star never makes the deal with Pagemasters.

***

The Star’s challenge is to be everything to everyone. Its demographic is regionally limited, in contrast to the rival Globe’s more affluent, highly educated readership. Still, an average weekday edition of the Star boasts 974,000 readers, more than twice any other Toronto-area paper. And thestar.com’s weekly readership also grew by 15.6 percent in nadbank’s interim 2008-09 report. Sparring with dailies is one thing—taking a swing at everything is quite another. Cruickshank says his paper no longer competes with just the Globe and theToronto Sun. It faces the same vertiginous test as every other news outlet—going up against the rest of the world. “We’re competing for people’s attention.” That’s why, he says, the website must become the focal point as its print publication services an ever-smaller group of niche readers. Of course, he admits, that requires an online business model that pays.

Despite Cruickshank’s talk of becoming a web-based organization, nearly every writer and editor interviewed for this story calls last year’s website redesign a work-in-progress at best. Although thestar.com is the most read newspaper website in the Greater Toronto Area, it trails theglobeandmail.com in online innovation. Cooke is the first editor to run both the print and online branches, and Cruickshank speaks vaguely of more centralization to come. This unknown future platform strikes fear into the hearts of print-centric journalists, but even Smith thinks the Star needs a stronger web presence. “This should have been done 10 years ago,” he says. “To give Cooke and the people who run the place credit, they recognize that and are trying to get there quickly.”

In the meantime, Cooke has moved two more reporters, Diana Zlomislic and Moira Welsh, onto the investigative unit to ensure that the  “i-team,” led by editor-reporter Kevin Donovan, publishes more frequently than in years past. Enter the quick-and-dirty, and cheeky, journalism that earned Cooke both readers and revulsion in Chicago. Donovan says he’s thrilled to finally work with an editor who understands the value of high-profile reporters such as Rob Cribb, Dale Brazao and David Bruser. In December 2009, Cooke approved a $12,000 Freedom of Information request in seconds, telling Donovan: “Pay it. Get the story. Appeal.” And when he’s enthusiastic about a story idea,  the boss e-mails, “I want to have your children!”

In September 2009, Zlomislic wrote a story about going undercover to get a fake diploma certifying her as a health support worker. Cooke ran a photo of the slim blond reporter splashed across the front page. The province responded with legislation to monitor career colleges. The i-team has also garnered government attention and forced policy change from stories on maltreatment and exploitation of foreign caregivers, the mishandling of green bin waste and exporting stolen vehicles. Cooke believes in self-promotion, and pieces tagged with “The Star gets action” are now a regular page-one fixture—so often, in fact, that the tags are straining credulity. “We might be using it a bit too much,” Donovan muses. Either way, the paper’s getting results.

Nicknamed “Fluffy” to his Gazette co-editor’s “Stuffy” in the 1980s, Cooke is yet again part of a Fluffy-Stuffy duo. Prizing readability over relevance, the paper’s water-cooler stories are often the most popular on the website—though they’re less popular with some editors. Often penned by writers such as Cathal Kelly and Lesley Ciarula Taylor, staffers have coined them “Barbies.” On any given day, the paper and website will be peppered with stories (some Star and some wire) about New York City residents protesting skinny models, the killing of a transsexual prostitute in Italy and Peruvian police fabricating a tale about thieves draining humans of fat to sell to cosmetics companies. Not to mention the column Catherine Porter wrote about her son and her placenta. Intended to offset the seriousness of the i-team stories and get people talking, Cooke and other editors champion these pieces for their human interest, not to mention schadenfreude—Tiger Woods’s infidelity mea culpa, for instance, landed A1 above the fold. “The secret to Cooke is that he is a great and unapologetic scavenger,” says Martin Newland, former deputy editor of the National Post and current editorial director at the Abu Dhabi Media Company. “He sees something in another paper, he steals it, adapts it and moves on.”

***

Grande skinny vanilla latte. Michael Cooke across the table in Starbucks. Arms crossed. Leaning back. Purple and white striped shirt. Grey jacket. Grey slacks. Rimless glasses nestled in dark hair, grey streaks markedly absent. Face shifts with feeling, save for steady eyebrows, peaked rooftops, like circumflexes. A man who laughs a lot, obviously—all the right lines creased on an otherwise-youthful face. After five months, two e-mails, five phone calls and one attempt to accost him in the newsroom (foiled by his executive assistant Lorraine Campbell), Cooke agrees to meet me. Confident. Doesn’t give an inch. Work speaks for itself. Print and online teams should work seamlessly. Should have the best website in the world—knows they have work to do. Should get more action—should have more, more, more “Star gets action” tags. Globe editor John Stackhouse’s brain, “big as a basketball,” can’t beat Cooke’s all-stars. Not the Toronto he remembers. Not the Toronto of the 1970s. Doesn’t matter—his squad could take Stackhouse’s any day of the week. “If you take any successful sports team—and I don’t do sports analogies, okay?—they know what they are,” Cooke says. “We are an attacking team. We are a team that beats people up. We throw the ball and we beat people up. We have a brand and we have a mission and everybody buys into it.”

He stops. Above us, beside our table, hovers a man in a worn green winter coat, mumbling incomprehensibly, eyes pleading, snot running from his nose, crusting on his face. Cooke looks up, turns to me. “This is going to be a test,” he says. “To see how you’re going to handle it.”

“How I’m going to handle it? The story’s not about me.”

He pauses.

“Sorry, mate, we haven’t got a penny between us. Come back in an hour,” he says firmly. The man slams a toonie and a loonie down on our table, still mumbling. He wanders away.

“You see, this is what you get when you sit with me,” Cooke says with a laugh and a look of surprise (the eyebrows do move after all). “Has that ever happened to you in your life? I didn’t fix this up. This is what happens. Write that down!”

Cooke slides the coins to the empty table beside us. The man drifts one more time around the coffee shop before pushing the door open and shuffling into the cold. It’s not the Toronto he remembers, but Cooke is just the same.

As executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC), Ralph Mellanby committed what he considered his first act of journalism just by rewinding some tape. The sponsors, Molson and Imperial Oil, insisted the program not replay fights. Show them live, show the cheap shots that instigated them, but don’t show the fights again.

The rule lasted until April 4, 1968. That day, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King; that evening, Liberals elected Pierre Trudeau party leader and prime minister. And that night, eight minutes into a playoff matchup between the Canadiens and the Bruins, Montreal’s John Ferguson and Boston’s Ted Green dropped the gloves. (Ferguson won.) But CBC didn’t show it, opting for news instead. Sensing the fight would set the tone for the rest of the series, though, Mellanby replayed it when HNIC finally went to air.

Fans were livid—because they’d missed the first period, that is. The outrage was so great that even CFTO, aCTV affiliate, fielded 150 calls from viewers who couldn’t reach the CBC switchboard. On a day that dramatically changed the political and social landscape of North America, Canadians just wanted to watch hockey.

While Mellanby’s defiance might have been brave, it’s a low benchmark for journalistic excellence. And despite the show’s periodic proclamations of a renewed focus on journalism, the old standard remains. On January 16, HNIC host Ron MacLean interviewed the NHL’s director of hockey operations, Colin Campbell, about the league’s latest scandal: Alexandre Burrows had accused referee Stephane Auger of having a vendetta against him after the Vancouver Canucks winger allegedly exaggerated the effects of a hit from Nashville Predator Jerred Smithson in a December 2009  game. When Auger officiated the Vancouver-Nashville rematch a month later, he gave Burrows a pre-game warning about embarrassing him, then handed the player three dubious penalties. The Canucks cried conspiracy.

Calling Campbell “Collie,” MacLean mocked Burrows while showing a clip of the hit: “We all thought he was dead.” The host broke down the footage of the player surreptitiously scoping out the refs and dragging out his recovery time—a tactic MacLean, a retired amateur referee, claimed was indicative of someone trying to draw a larger penalty. He then ran a series of clips of Burrows skirting the rules and getting away with dirty plays in the past. “Your sins will sort you out,” he pronounced. “Burrows has clearly made his bed.”

His unconcealed contempt aside, MacLean made a compelling case. But what could have been a measured takedown of both a dodgy player and a biased ref—a far worse problem for a sports league—degenerated into an ad hominem attack. MacLean didn’t give Burrows a chance to defend himself and later scoffed at the notion of a ref with an agenda, limiting his criticisms of the league to its ineffectual handling of habitual trouble-makers. Among his colleagues, MacLean (who did not return requests seeking comment) has a reputation as a guy who doesn’t pull punches. But that night, up against an NHL official, he seemed content to carry water.

Canada’s hockey broadcasts—HNIC, Rogers Sportsnet’s Hockeycentral and NHL on TSN—rely on business partnerships with the league. As reported by William Houston, then a sports media reporter for The Globe and Mail and now editor of truthandrumours.net, CTVglobemedia pays $35 to $40 million annually to air about 70 games and several playoff rounds on TSN, while CBC forks over $100 million per season for its marquee games on Saturday night and exclusive rights to the Stanley Cup final. Critics say these deals present a conflict of interest and undermine the networks’ motivations to do investigative journalism that could sully the reputation of the league—and their shows. “Anyone looking to a hockey broadcast for journalism,” says Toronto Star sports media columnist Chris Zelkovich, “is looking in the wrong place.”

But TSN, which launched in 1984, tries to tailor its coverage to the hardcore fan with strong and unsentimental reporting and analysis. In August 2009, Darren Dreger was following the upheaval in the NHLPlayers’ Association (NHLPA). On Friday, August 28, he predicted on-air that executive director Paul Kelly’s future was in peril. Leadership has long been controversial in the NHLPA. Founding executive director Alan Eagleson served time for fraud, and players accused Kelly’s predecessor, Ted Saskin, of spying on their e-mails. Given this history, senior producer Ken Volden granted Dreger’s request to cover the union’s meetings in Chicago. Two days later, he was the lone journalist at the Drake Hotel when the executive board fired Kelly at 3:30 a.m. Dreger won’t make assumptions about why no other network covered the meetings, but says, “I can assure you, if most had a do-over, they would do it differently.”

Faced with the challenge of covering a game so deeply rooted in the Canadian identity—combined with overbearing sponsors and a league that can be thin-skinned and arrogant—it’s easy to opt for deference and to let uncomfortable stories slide. But NHL on TSN suggests televised hockey-talk can still be principled, trustworthy and undeterred by the inertia of tradition.

* * *

For CBC, the game’s steadfast protector, hockey is ritual. Nostalgia-heavy broadcasts are an effective draw, though: HNIC regularly places in the top 20 in Canada’s BBM Nielsen ratings. Not that the show has no journalistic spine: Scott Morrison, a one-time Toronto Sun sports editor and Sportsnet’s former managing editor of hockey, co-hosts the “iDesk” segment with Jeff Marek, while Pierre LeBrun, a respected writer for espn.com, often appears on “The Hotstove” panel discussion. And Elliotte Friedman roams the sidelines conducting interviews and contributing features to the pre-game show Inside Hockey. Still, Friedman acknowledges the duality of his role. “It can’t be hard-core journalism all the time,” he says. “I still take it pretty seriously, but I realize part of making a broadcast successful is making it entertaining.”

That’s why “The Hotstove” also features loudmouth Mike Milbury, a former player, coach and general manager whose role is to react to LeBrun and the other panelists with contrarian bombast. That’s also why “Coach’s Corner”—a platform for Don Cherry to praise the troops, junior hockey and tough guys, and to heap scorn on those who dodge fights, wear visors or are European—remains the show’s spiritual centrepiece.

Although the talking heads may occasionally hold the league accountable, there’s a difference between debate about the news and the reporting that breaks it. Coordinating producer Brian Spear calls HNIC a “family show,” noting many Canadians watch one game a week—his. As TSN’s vice-president of production, Mark Milliere says, “Your grandmother’s watching it while she’s making soup on Saturday nights.” Even Mellanby’s wife “won’t watch the game, but she’ll watch Don Cherry.” Hockey fans may tune in to HNIC for the hockey, but the average Canadian watches out of habit.

* * *

Sportsnet’s role in the mosaic is less defined. Since its launch in 1998, the network’s personality has vacillated as its personnel has turned over. When Morrison arrived in 2001, he wanted to build a journalistically sound hockey department, with a staff that included Darren Dreger as Hockeycentral host. But that philosophy changed in 2006 when Sportsnet decided to go after what Morrison calls “the elusive 18-to-whatever audience,” discarding the standards he felt his team had successfully established.

Morrison and Dreger left, but Nick Kypreos stayed. Last fall, the former NHL tough guy scored an exclusive sit-down with Mike Danton, who’d just served five years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. Most people believed his agent, David Frost, was the target when he’d tried to hire a hitman. (Frost’s long relationship with the player struck most people as harmful and exploitive.) But now, out of prison, Danton claimed he actually wanted to kill his allegedly abusive father, Steve Jefferson. The November interview was a huge get—a high-profile, national event for a network that specializes in regional broadcasts.

When Danton claimed he’d wanted his father dead, Kypreos ignored the substantial evidence to the contrary. “Rogue Agent,” one of Bob McKeown’s three documentaries on the story for CBC’s the fifth estate, featured multiple phone calls in which Danton tried to hire two different men—including a dispatcher for the local St. Louis police—to “take care of” Frost. Officers later arrested the player at San Jose International Airport. While awaiting indictment in a California jail, he crawled back to Frost. Later in the documentary, McKeown played a call in which the nervous agent advised the player on the coming legal proceedings, instructing him to blame his parents. Frost then asked if he still had to worry about his own safety.

Now walking free, Danton told a wildly different story. But Kypreos didn’t challenge this alternate history—he legitimized it. Over the hour, Danton spoke at length, explaining his bad behaviour, downplaying his relationship with Frost and offering appropriate contrition. By the time Kypreos asked what “prison was like for a guy that knows nothing but hockey,” it was obvious this wasn’t a fifth estate-style exposé. This was the first stop of the Mike Danton Soft-Focus Redemption Tour, sponsored by Sportsnet, with your host, Nick Kypreos.

Although the show drew an impressive 189,000 viewers, the reviews were predominantly negative. Globesports media columnist Bruce Dowbiggin said Kypreos seemed “unwilling to judge his subject” and that this approach “postpones the inevitable date with reality.” Friedman, who’s careful not to denounce his friend, admits there were elements of the interview he didn’t believe and wondered how thoroughly his colleague had prepared. Houston was blunt: The reluctance to push Danton to answer any tough questions “made the exercise a failure.”

In a statement on sportsnet.ca, Kypreos admitted he could have been more thorough and tenacious, but didn’t want to risk “Danton getting up and leaving with so many storylines still untold.” Considering the Rogers stable also boasts veteran reporter Mike Brophy and radio host Bob McCown, revered by one peer as the “greatest shit-disturber in Canadian sports media,” Kypreos’s botched effort was just another squandered opportunity for the network.

* * *

Steve Dryden, TSN’s managing editor of hockey, gets a little sheepish when he talks about his binders.

His office in the CTV complex in suburban Toronto is unremarkable, except for a signed photo of Bobby Orr and Eric Lindros on the ice together. The bookshelf to his left is stocked with hockey reference materials, scouting reports and record books dating from the 1970s; below those are colour-coded binders. Smirking, Dryden explains the red binders contain handwritten box scores for every NHL game since the early 2000s, while the others are packed with pertinent stats—blocked shots, breakaways, fights and turnovers, all of which he diligently compiles. The former editor-in-chief of The Hockey News has been doing this since he covered the OHL’s Cornwall Royals for the Cornwall Standard Freeholder in the 1980s. The records help him keep track of trends and storylines, and serve as a physical memory bank when he sends producers into the archives to put together clip packages. He considers it an “old school” approach rather than an obsessive one—a throwback to a newspaper sensibility.

On Dryden’s desk is a replica of a crude early-model goalie mask. It’s there for a segment on Jacques Plante, the first goalie to regularly wear one 50 years ago. TSN commemorated the milestone with a piece that explored the birth of the mask from the perspective of Andy Bathgate, whose shot was the last to hit Plante before the goalie insisted on wearing his mask in games. NHL on TSN host James Duthie introduced the segment with an under-reported side of the story: the shot, Bathgate admitted on air, was intentional. A few games earlier, the Canadiens’ goalie delivered a dangerous poke-check that sent the New York Ranger headfirst into the boards. When Bathgate got the chance to retaliate with a wrist shot into the netminder’s cheek, he took it. Rather than rehash the oft-told Plante story with the pablum of the goalie mask’s evolution, Duthie found a lesser-known, more substantial angle.

The studio component of NHL on TSN supports the program’s role as what Milliere calls “the show of record” for hockey in Canada. The team includes Bob McKenzie, another editor emeritus of The Hockey News, and Dreger, the show’s “insiders.” Even Duthie is a journalism school graduate who started in news. Though they too admit entertainment is a large part of the job—“You’d be naive to say it’s not the number one goal,” Duthie says—they keep the analytical elements accessible and dignified, complemented by daily reporting. The result is an editorial mix that blends the breaking news of trades, transactions and injuries with reflections on issues facing the league and the occasional investigative report.

On October 29, 2009, the broadcast day begins when the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning arrive at the St. Pete Times Forum for their morning skate. The play-by-play announcers, colour commentators and producers speak with players and coaches. They’ll develop five to 10 stories (including who’s injured, who’s playing well and who’s changing lines) that will be further refined as the broadcast approaches. “It’s preparation meets opportunity,” says Milliere. “Every match-up is a play in three acts, and every night there’s a story to be told.”

But these stories can often seem like fictions. He offers the hypothetical example of an early season game when Maple Leaf goalies Vesa Toskala and Jonas Gustavsson were in competition for the starting job. The show’s opening teases the rivalry with footage of each man at practice. When Gustavsson makes a spectacular save during the game, a camera cuts to Toskala on the bench, lingering long enough on his blank expression to cast doubt on whether he’s happy for his teammate or upset his job is on the line. With a cut to Toronto coach Ron Wilson looking pleased, the dramatic elements of the story, real or not, begin to emerge.

This is storytelling, absolutely—an important component of journalism, and more entertaining than, say, a dry recitation of statistics—but given the banality of the typical athlete interview, there’s little reason to believe the truth is nearly as exciting as this series of jump-cuts makes it seem.

* * *

Both TSN and CBC deny their sponsors or the league carry any editorial weight. “Push-back is not common,” Dryden says. “They understand that that’s the job. We’re constantly raising issues, big or small.” He notes that TSN found instances of goals scored after the puck bounced off the protective netting above the boards. Officials had been missing it, counting goals when the play should have been called dead, and NHL on TSNaired the evidence. “The NHL didn’t want us shining a light on that,” he says.

But the league has bigger problems. Head injuries have been impossible to ignore since Don Sanderson, a 21-year-old minor league hockey player, fell into a coma and died after hitting his head on the ice during a December 12, 2008 fight. Through the end of last October, the NHL claimed only 10 players had suffered concussions in exhibition games and the first month of the season. But TSN conducted its own survey of all 30 teams and found that 26 players had missed games with concussions or related symptoms. “I don’t know what their threshold is,” Dryden says of the league’s head injury policy. “Apparently, it’s bigger than ours.”

Still, autonomy from the powers that be isn’t always a given. McKeown says that during production of one of his Danton docs, he asked CBC Sports for footage, but his timing was lousy; CBC was negotiating rights with the NHL and there was rampant speculation that the network might lose its broadcasting rights altogether.CBC Sports denied him access to any Danton footage and he ended up using clips from a Fox Sports affiliate in Missouri. Joel Darling, then the executive producer of HNIC, says he doesn’t remember the incident, but points out, “There are rights issues everybody has to deal with.”

McKeown’s not bitter—he happily acknowledges the value of HNIC—and maybe he should have expectedCBC to be risk-averse. Dave Hodge, now an NHL on TSN commentator, was similarly stymied. He preceded MacLean as HNIC host and, after Philadelphia Flyers goalie Pelle Lindbergh died in a 1985 alcohol-related accident, wanted to do a feature on drunk driving. He worried it was too common around the league, and hoped to include HNIC’s sponsor, Molson, in the segment. CBC killed the feature without explanation. Hodge won’t speculate about what happened—he just chuckles and says he no longer pays any attention to sponsors.

* * *

Because they must live in what McKenzie calls a “state of perpetual awareness,” he and other hockey reporters don’t have a formal preparation period. “You don’t cram before going on television,” he says, en route to shoot a segment for TSN’s Off the Record as a last-minute fill-in.

The game day routine is similar for everyone at NHL on TSN: Read sports on the internet for a few hours, have a conference call with Dryden at 10 a.m., maybe do a radio appearance, then call up sources or catch up on game footage before a 5 or 5:30 p.m. meeting in Dryden’s office, where all the stories and segments go up on the white board. At the October 29 meeting, Duthie’s BlackBerry buzzes. He reads the message aloud. “Did you see this? Cogliano dressed up as Dany Heatley for the Oilers’ Halloween party.”

Everyone in the room laughs. Over the summer, rumours suggested Heatley, then with the Ottawa Senators, would be traded to Edmonton, against his wishes, for Andrew Cogliano and two other players. Dryden adds “Cogliano” to the board and moves on, but Duthie occasionally pipes up with more information until there’s a complete picture: “All Ottawa gear—bag, hat, gloves, visor, no teeth.”

The updates came from Cogliano. “I have relationships with a couple hundred players,” Duthie says, “but I tell them it doesn’t mean I’m going to coddle them. If there’s something to criticize about them, I will.” Still, he admits there are secrets he keeps—secrets that would surely be stories. “But that’s how you foster a relationship with someone to gain trust. Sometimes you don’t repeat what you know. That’s just all part of the process.”

For McKeown, this can both help and hinder coverage of sports—or Parliament Hill. “You get to know the individuals on a personal basis,” he says, “and it takes you away from the arm’s-length objectivity journalism is supposed to have.” Paul Romanuk, a former tsn play-by-play announcer, is more direct: “Journalism is what a newspaper writer does, perhaps a reporter at a TV station, but not a live sports broadcast. Anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself.” He qualifies that statement a moment later: “I’m not saying broadcasters aren’t critical of the product, but never confuse it with hardcore journalism, because it simply is not.”

An example of a story he doesn’t believe a rights-holder would break is the 1986 Sports Illustrated feature that exposed the wild partying of the Edmonton Oilers—to Romanuk, a piece of “real” journalism.

When McKenzie was editor at The Hockey News, though, that paper picked up on the story. Even today, he insists he and his colleagues wouldn’t hesitate to break it. He knows NHL on TSN isn’t all hard news, “but is a newspaper all hard news?” he asks. “No, it’s not. And yet, people might not ask whether a newspaper is journalism—they’d just say, ‘Of course it is.’ The vehicle doesn’t really matter.”

But this is Canada—hockey does matter, and the networks that broadcast the NHL have a choice: commit to journalism or bask in the game’s glory. For Friedman, Morrison and others who work on HNIC, being part of the program is an honour. The show, however, is an institution often interchangeable with hockey itself in the annals of Canadiana. The journalistic pedigrees of its staff are legitimate, but the broadcast is the sport’s standard-bearer.

NHL on TSN isn’t hamstrung by history, and without a rigid format, it can make room for stories others might miss. Critics may dismiss the job as easy—this is just sports, after all. The reporters work hard, sure, and there are stories worth chasing, but the stakes are undeniably lower than covering politics or finance. That’s not lost on the TSN crew. “The guys always show up at the same time at the arena,” jokes Duthie. “They skate around for an hour and you ask them dumb questions afterwards.” Some reporters more effectively than others.

It’s 5 p.m. and Washington, D.C. buzzes with pencil-pushers crowding into Beltway bars. Julian Sher joins them at a spot not far from FBI headquarters and the U.S. Department of Justice. One Child at a Time, his book about the child pornography underground, has just come out and he’s here to catch up with two of his sources. Special Agent Emily Vacher is petite and blonde, casually dressed in jeans; Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, towers almost a foot above Sher and looks Viking-like, save for his customary suit and tie. They can’t get a table, so they stand at the bar and talk about the investigative journalist’s next project.

“You should do something about child prostitution,” says Oosterbaan.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” says Vacher. “In terms of child abuse, internet predators are important, but there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who are being ignored.” They tell Sher about their work to save child prostitutes and he’s shocked to hear they’re talking about American kids, not foreign children subjected to trafficking. “It’s the girl next door, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks,” says Oosterbaan. “These are the invisible children.” Vacher nods and says, “The FBI’s got a whole squad of people now doing nothing but trying to rescue these kids and going after the pimps.”

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Sher’s heard from lots of people who want their stories told: the wrongfully convicted, after he helped unearth the truth about the shoddy police work in Steven Truscott’s case; the informers, after he co-wrote two books about the Hells Angels. These are mostly people with personal agendas, but this tip was coming from two insiders he trusts. He also knows Vacher and Oosterbaan can open doors for him in his research.

Sher is good at keeping in touch with his sources. Whenever he finds himself anywhere other than his native Montreal, he tries to give someone a call: the people who fought the KKK in his 1983 book White Hoods; the cops he met a decade ago while writing about the Hells Angels; or the Truscott family, to whom he devoted 10 years of his life. He wants to see how they’re doing and catch up, but he gains more than friendship from keeping contacts close. His stories are often interconnected, with a previous source leading to the next big idea. And Sher knows his connections keep him a step ahead of the pack, because the problems he runs up against are not uniquely his. All investigative journalists face them today: risk-averse book publishers, budget-slashing broadcasters and media-induced shortened attention spans. Investigative journalism doesn’t quite fit in; its need for more words and more airtime makes it a difficult sell.

Fuelled by his tenacity and natural gift as a networker, Sher’s work has appeared everywhere from The Globe and Mail to CBC’s the fifth estate. But media outlets’ commitment to investigative journalism is fading. Investigative stories are costly to produce in any medium, and space and funding are dwindling. With a trail of successes behind him, even Sher can’t see what lies ahead.

Sher can barely sit still. As he talks, his hands are in constant motion, as if they are what push his ideas forward. He talks fast; perhaps his second career choice could have had him standing at the auction block. But the 56-year-old never had any interest in auctioneering. He always wanted to be a journalist. After writing a serial thriller for his summer camp’s newspaper, contributing to a newspaper for children in the hospital when he was a grade schooler and writing an annual play for the kids near his family’s summer cottage in the Laurentians, his career seemed set. And from the beginning, he was ambitious: At his high school paper, his first interview—with questions and answers sent by mail—was with Pierre Trudeau. He chose McGill University largely because he wanted to work at TheMcGill Daily, where he was a fixture for five years while getting a history degree. There, he became involved in student politics, including backing a support workers’ strike—a galvanizing moment. He spent the rest of his 20s involved in campus activism and writing for the left-wing Montreal newspaper The Forge. He worked at United Press International and at the Westmount Examiner before he accepted a one-day contract at CBC Radio’s Daybreak in 1983. He ended up staying there until nabbing a position in local TV. In the late 1980s, Sher helped produce an investigative segment about poor roadway infrastructure for CBC Montreal’s supper-hour show, Newswatch. It caught the attention of Kelly Crichton, a producer at the fifth. “It showed he knew how to dig,” she says, “and he wasn’t afraid of flak.” She asked him to fly to Toronto to talk about working for the current affairs program. He found himself on the same plane as his first interview subject. Sher struck up a conversation and, later, when Crichton asked about his flight, he told her about his encounter with the former prime minister. He got the job.

* * *

After their chat in the bar, Oosterbaan puts Sher in contact with prosecutors who try cases involving child prostitution. He starts talking to them. He wants to understand the law. Federal prosecutor Sherri Stephan tells him about a pimp she tried for conspiracies to commit trafficking and money laundering. Sher is shocked that she and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Richardson were able to put Matthew “Knowledge” Thompkins away for nearly 25 years. Sher keeps digging. After Vacher tells him about the FBI’s Innocence Lost National Initiative, he writes to the bureau, telling the agents about his book involving the Innocent Images unit, and asks them for access. That gets him an interview with the taskforce heads, and leads to a list of the unit’s best agents across the country. Sher contacts Dan Garrabrant, a New Jersey agent who tells Sher about his cases and mentions a girl from Atlantic City referred to as Maria. Garrabrant’s been trying to help her since they met during an arrest when she was 17 years old—four years into her life as a prostitute. But her name is one of many, and Sher doesn’t get the details of her story for two months. When he does, Garrabrant provides a thorough explanation of her case, including the name of her former pimp: Knowledge.

* * *

I’m not in the good news business,” Sher says. Instead, he likes stories that “hold a dark mirror to society.” He wants to make people uncomfortable. But he did more than that with one 1992 piece he produced for the fifth. Sher and the rest of his team, including reporter Hana Gartner, were looking into gangsters running drugs in Montreal when associate producer Dan Burke talked to RCMP drug inspector Claude Savoie. They had no idea Internal Affairs was already investigating him for accepting bribes, but with each question they asked, more questions cropped up. They were suspicious of his associations with drug kingpin Allan Ross and added the information to their story. Twenty-four hours before the documentary was set to air, Sher and his team learned that Savoie had shot himself in the head with his service revolver while two officers inRCMP headquarters were preparing to question him. “We were both like whirling dervishes,” remembers Gartner. “No story is worth anybody offing himself.” They hurried to the studio to film a stand-up so she could add the news to the story, as well as to include recorded conversations between Burke and Savoie. It aired on schedule.

Investigative journalism can drastically alter lives—even play a hand in ending them. It’s part of the job, and Sher accepts that. But only because he has to. Savoie’s suicide still weighs on his mind. His eyes drop and his near-constant smile fades as he says, “All I could think was that his kids would never have another Christmas with their father.” He looks down at his unusually still hands, then looks up again. “But I have to remind myself that I’m not the one who accepted the bribes.”

Other times, investigative journalism drastically alters lives for the better. Steven Truscott, wrongfully convicted of murdering Lynne Harper in 1959 when he was 14 years old, had lived under an assumed name since his release from prison in 1969. Early on in Sher’s investigation, he and reporter Linden MacIntyre spoke with Truscott. While MacIntyre was more sympathetic, Sher told him, “If you want somebody to clear your name, hire a defence attorney. That’s not our job. But if you give us free rein to investigate wherever we can, that’s what we’ll do.”

His approach to the story was simple: presume Truscott’s guilt, but examine every piece of evidence to see if all the pieces of the puzzle fit. Sher and his team read all the reports, scoured every court transcript, and talked to any witnesses still alive from that time, as well as witnesses who never took the stand. The team resubmitted the original medical evidence to modern-day experts, the results of which showed that “the initialmedical examination was a sham,” says Sher. His crew found one crucial fact: a dubious time of death in the autopsy report, which MacIntyre calls “scientifically impossible,” helped prove Truscott could not have been the killer. Without Sher’s research for the documentary and for the book he later wrote—“Until You Are Dead”: Steven Truscott’s Long Ride into History—the Ontario Court of Appeal might never have acquitted Truscott.

* * *

The pimp known as Knowledge helped bring Sher’s latest book together. He was the connection between theFBI’s story and the prosecutor’s case. Although he never answered the letters Sher sent him in jail, his story still gives the book—tentatively called Somebody’s Daughter—a narrative thread. But girls like Maria, the former child prostitute, give readers a reason to care about the book. If only someone would publish it.

“Prostitutes are only seen as ‘black hos’ or ‘white trash,’” says Sher. “The whole point of the book is that these girls are neglected and nobody cares about them. So it’s a little hard to convince a publisher to do a book about kids that nobody cares about.” Diane Martin, publisher-at-large of Random House Canada, attests to this. She worked with Sher on some of his previous projects, but says, “I’m not sure what would motivate people to spend say, $32, for a hardcover on that subject. I know I wouldn’t.” Book sales in Canada are holding steady, but this story is too gritty for most major publishers and retailers. “Places like Wal-Mart and Costco are big customers now. If they think their buyers won’t be interested, they won’t buy it.” And this book might be too much for those shoppers.

Sher pitched his idea to Random House, HarperCollins and Disney’s Hyperion. All liked it, but knew they’d never get the book by their sales departments. All declined.

* * *

We’re on our way to meet editor Ilona Crabbe in a CBC edit suite in Toronto. Sher is working with her on an episode of a six-hour series about World War II called Love, Hate and Propaganda. After we get there, they start talking about the firebombing in Tokyo and whether or not to use some costly stills of bodies charred in American attacks.

She leans back in her chair, rocking, hands behind her head and legs crossed. He sits at a long table behind her, leaning forward to read the script in front of him. They talk over each other, Sher’s hands flailing. His colleagues at the fifth nicknamed him “the hamster” for a reason. He taps his pen on the script while Crabbe continues rocking in her chair. He highlights what he needs to fix, then they talk about the pictures again—one of a charred baby in particular.

“I’m going to fight for that picture,” says Sher. “We’re trying to show the horrors of war here.”

We watch the scene on the monitor to our left. Crabbe stops the video. “Is it too gruesome?” Sher asks me. I say no, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

While Crabbe sets up the mic for his voice-over, she sings the Mickey Mouse Club theme song under her breath. After recording, they dicker over the script and try to find another word for “featured.” Before we leave, they watch a scene about American propaganda and Sher and Crabbe dance ironically, bodies twisting and fingers pointing in the air, while on screen the musicians sing, “We’re gonna have to slap / the dirty little Jap.”

The World War II documentary isn’t Sher’s usual story. He isn’t burrowing into a tight-knit community to save the underdog. He doesn’t have to worry about anyone shooting at him or suing him. A piece like this gets an average budget of $500,000, and with this six-part series, CBC hopes to reach a younger audience—even hiring George Stroumboulopoulos to host. Sher likes the idea of doing something out of the ordinary. He’s seen a lot of changes in investigative journalism during his career and believes the current scarcity is a reflection of the shift in what media head honchos are willing to pay. “I think there’s a lot of penny-pinching by short-minded publishers, or even managers in broadcast. It’s funny; they’re interested in cheap reality shows,” Sher says. “Duh, what greater reality show is there than investigative journalism?”

* * *

Somebody’s Daughter is almost complete and Sher still hasn’t signed with a publisher, so he tells his agent to devote his time to more lucrative projects. Then Sher tries something he’s never done before: after five books—four with major publishers—he sends his unsolicited manuscript to 12 independents. He doesn’t hear back from most of them. He gets feelers from a couple. And then, he gets a call from Chicago Review Press, which wants to publish the book that seemed so undesirable. Sher will get $10,000 upfront, but it’s a smaller advance than he’s used to.

Catering to fewer and fewer outlets is the reality for today’s independent investigative journalists. Sher juggles many projects to keep busy and to fund the ones he struggles to sell. “Books and freelance are in many ways the way to go to do investigative work. But you can’t survive on that,” he says. “So you have to do whatever documentaries and other freelance stuff you can to pay for spending two years on writing a book about child prostitution.” He flew to the U.S. with reward points he’d saved; when his destination was close enough to home—New York City, for example—he took the train. Sher believes there’s still a thirst for important, well-researched stories, but even good journalists have to be lucky to get a stint at the fifth or sign a contract with CBC’s documentary unit. “We don’t have that feeder system—that training system—that’s grooming the next generation.”

Sher aimed to foster future talent himself by starting JournalismNet, a collection of online tools for reporters. He’s since sold the site to a U.S. internet company, but continues doing newsroom training on web research techniques. He’s happy to spill the secrets of his working process to anyone who will listen. If a story needs to be told, he says, it doesn’t matter who tells it. He’s trained reporters at BBC, CNN, CBC and CTV, and they all have good things to say about him. So do his colleagues—more than one of them apologizes for telling me how much they like him because they’re sure I’ve heard it all before. Only Ricky Ciarnelleo, a spokesman for a B.C. branch of the Hells Angels, is less than complimentary—and even then, his opinion seems tepid for a member of a biker gang: He calls Sher a “pimp” who “sells books instead of women.” Sher’s innate talent for networking, working sources and staying in touch even when he doesn’t need a favour, turns out to be a skill that wins friends, not just scoops. What it doesn’t win is big paycheques.

* * *

Maria, the young girl exploited by Knowledge and saved by Garrabrant, is now 22. Garrabrant holds her newborn in his arms as he, Maria and Sher stand in her parents’ comfortable Atlantic City home. Sher looks on as Garrabrant and Maria discuss baby formula. It seems normal, save for the fact Sher knows their past.

Earlier this year, he completed the World War II doc and had nothing planned for the immediate future. He was “gainfully unemployed” and waiting for Somebody’s Daughter to come out in the fall. But, he recently signed a one-year deal with Global Television to do a series on crime and justice. He also has a pitch out for a book he’s writing about a former FBI profiler who sometimes writes for the TV series Criminal Minds. (He contacted Sher after reading One Child at a Time.)

His connections aren’t just with cops and prosecutors, though. Maria has been out of “the game,” as she calls it, for a while now and wants to go back to school, but she’s had to start stripping to take care of her baby. She tried working as a telemarketer, but couldn’t stand lying to people. Garrabrant, who insists she hasn’t gone back to prostitution, continues to check in on her. So does Sher, even bringing her baby clothes. He understands she’s doing what she must to survive. He does the same.